Mobilemind

I'm fortunate that this blog is an early stop on the “#Lrn3D” virtual book tour for Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration by Karl M. Kapp and Tony O'Driscoll. There is much to come on the tour, from colleagues and friends widely held in high esteem through the learning and training profession. My perspective on virtual worlds may cast me as an outlier, and therefore warrant some explanation. If you can bear with my explanation and thoughts about it, there just may be a book discount in it for you.

Though I am competitive, I'm not a gamer. I'm considered a technologist by myself and others, but I'm not a fan of virtual worlds and Second Life. I've tried them a few times and they have served little purpose for me. I suspect it may be awhile before they do. [Although Stephen Colbert recently said that “…more and more of life is becoming 3D.”]

The previous paragraph is an odd transition into a post about Learning in 3D. However, I believe my post, like the book it is about, will benefit both others like myself, and those at the other end of the spectrum. Personally, I am challenged to understand and find the benefits of these environments. It often seems that training needs can be better served by more widely understood and widely adopted technologies combined with sound instructional design and basic business acumen. Virtual Worlds and 3D for learning are areas that deserve thought and resources whether you find yourself enamored, intrigued or skeptical.

As an avowed skeptic, I found information in the book to expand my understanding of these areas and tools to apply to learning in 3D (as well as simulations and training in general). Two things in particular helped me become more understanding of virtual worlds for learning. First, an alternate view– not thinking of the technology, but the plot or story. As contributor Randy Hinrichs puts it in Chapter 4:

Virtual worlds are about theater, character development, relationships with other characters, plot, conflict, denouement, catharsis, and conclusion. We need to design for the full immersive experience in which the users must adapt to the environment, survive in the environment, and fail if they haven’t learned well enough.

Second, I benefited from frameworks and scaffolding as schemas for concepts and as job aids for design and development. The authors deliver on these with useful tools like a model of design principles for 3D Learning Experiences (also in Chapter 4). There are other useful checklists presented as rhetorical “Key Questions” throughout.

Finally, I found it refreshing to review the case studies both for the successes and the lessons learned about design and implementation. It’s not just pie-in-the-sky, but gets down to brass tacks about what worked, what didn’t and how it can be done better in the future. These are real case studies from major organizations, and there are nine of them. Each has some innovation and some challenges. I really appreciate that they also share the lessons learned about implementation, orientation, design and evaluation.

That just skims a few parts of the book. I’ll leave it to my colleagues to provide broader and deeper analysis— I just touched on a few areas, mostly from Chapters 4 and 6. If you’d like to learn more about the book, stay tuned to the virtual book tour, visit the book web site, book wiki or for awhile buy it from the publisher with a 20% discount using code L3D1.

Labels: elearning, second life, secondlife, simulation, technology

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One screen of my iPhone is dedicated to essential travel apps and I'd like to share that list with you. For comparison I'm also including a link to and the short list of Travel Tech: Top 20 iPhone Travel Apps from National Geographic Adventure.

My key travel apps for iPhone (prices as of July 3, 2009):

1. TravelTracker with TripIt $7.99

   If you take more than 6 trips a year get this app and sign up for TripIt service on the web. TravelTracker shines over the free TripIt app because it keeps past trips and has many more features. Silverware is a good company and this is a good app. Loved the previous TravelTracker incarnations on the Newton & the Palm, and I got it on iPhone as soon as it came out as a new-from-ground-up, smarter app. I'd hold off on getting the “Pro” version for now though... there are some iPhone 3.0 issues to sort out. In a few weeks I will be upgrading to TravelTracker Pro though, so I can get live flight status plus download and upload to TripIt. Update: A new version of TravelTracker posted to the App Store today—July 3, 2009.

2. TripIt for iPhone Free

   Huh? You just said TravelTracker. I use both. The TripIt app is less cluttered and faster— for the current trip, but I can not easily forward an itinerary or do many other things that TravelTracker does so well. I use TripIt for quick access to info on the current trip, like hitting the rental car info with my big fat thumb as I dash away from baggage claim.

3. The Weather Channel Free

   As National Geographic puts it:

   [The Weather Channel app] gets the nod for customization and the ability to check out conditions in multiple locations at a glance.

4. AroundMe Free

   I admit it, Starbucks pwns me. AroundMe helps me quickly find that essential latte, or a local equivalent and other conveniences (ATM/bank, restaurant, pharmacy, retailer). I've tried coffee-specific apps and a few brand-name bank/retailer/restaurant finders. This particular app works well and seems current most places I go, and does away with having a slew of category/vendor-specifc apps.
   

5. Currency Free

   Fantastic currency converter that auto-updates exchange rates. Shows a purchase amount in multiple currencies of your choice at the same time. Easily switch from entering in one currency to entering in another. Very helpful on my trip to Singapore when trying to figure out what $5 USD was in SGD or what $900 SGD is in USD (answer: 1 nice watch).
   

6. Taxi Magic Free

   Great app for getting a taxi when you aren't in an urban center or near a taxi stand. It electronically hails a taxi and sends your current location to your choice of cab companies. You can even create an account & use it to pay for the ride, without using cash or credit in the cab. Cities supported include: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, LA, Minneapolis, Nashville, NYC, the OC, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, Dan Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington DC.

7. Urban Spoon Free

   The best way to break the logjam of “I dunno, where do you want to go.” Also nice to find something interesting & local instead of the shopping mall-perimeter chain restaurant defaults.

Then there are the airline superstars of iPhone web app-friendliness. The standout here is JetBlue, who has a very useful and colorful web app. Honorable mention to Southwest Airlines, who made great use of the very cool iUI iPhone templates found on Google Code.

To make the most of any of the web apps below, just visit the URL on your iPhone and then bookmark with the “Add to Home Screen” option.

Great iPhone web apps from airlines to add to your iPhone homescreen (actual iPhone/Touch home screen icons shown):

• JetBlue mobile http://mobile.jetblue.com/
• American Airlines mobile http://mobile.aa.com/
• Delta mobile http://mobile.delta.com/
• Southwest mobile http://mobile.southwest.com/

I heard back from @Alaska Airlines on twitter that Alaska is working on it. Go Alaska! No word from United Airlines on when http://ua.flightlookup.com will become more iPhone-aware. Sadly, the very-cool, but Flash-dependent site of Virgin America doesn't make the iPhone cut either (as of July 3, 2009). Btw, lots of airlines are on twitter, as I found out working on @AICC followers.

A Few Extra Travel-related Apps
Rounding-out my travel page I have Aeroguide Lite (Free) to recognize things like that rare Ilyushin Il-62 I once saw over SFO (an Il-62 looks like MD-80/DC-9 with 4 engines or a Vickers VC10).

Other miscellanneous items on the page include: Gas Cubby ($9.99) for recording and charting the MPG, etc. of my own car; FedEx Mobile (Free) for help with shipping; and Google Earth (Free) for miscellaneous mapping and geographical visualization.

The National Geographic Adventure List
To get more detailed information on their picks, please see Travel Tech: Top 20 iPhone Travel Apps from National Geographic Adventure. I've add my opinions to their list below where I had feelings one way or the other. For reference, here is their list:

1. Next Flight $2.99
2. Urban Spoon Free
3. HearPlanet reg $5.99 (on sale for $1.99 on July 3, 2009)
4. Air Sharing $4.99(Nix I say, get FTP On the Go)
5. Tweetie $2.99 (Nice, but nix say I. Get free TweetDeck or Twittelator Pro for $4.99, or both as I did)
6. IAmHere $0.99
7. World Customs $0.99
8. Wi-Fi Finder Free
9. The Weather Channel Free
10. Google Earth Free
11. Packing $1.99 (on sale for $0.99 on July 3, 2009. This one *I* might try)
12. Room Free
13. FlightTrack Pro $9.99 (Nix, I say, get TravelTracker w/TripIt)
14. Lonely Planet Phrasebook $9.99
15. Skype Free (I totally agree here–a very popular app, 4M downloads & estimated to be on 10%+ of iPhones)
16. WriteRoom $4.99
17. (Amazon) Kindle for iPhone Free (I totally agree here too)
18. Cheap Gas Free
19. Babelingo $3.99 (on sale for $1.99 on July 3, 2009)
20. Where Free

Labels: Apple, iPhone, technology, tips, tools, travel

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Once used on the iPhone, turning off MobileMe sync for bookmarks will result in deletion of all the bookmarks on the iPhone. Furthermore, there is no way to force the iPhone bookmarks to over-write things on the Mac if the sync ever goes awry.

If, like me, you ever end-up with the "good" bookmarks on the iPhone and "bad" on the Mac, there is just no way to sync the good over and replace the bad. However, one can do some tricks with the iPhone back-up preferences file (plist) and Mac Safari export/import bookmarks to achieve a transfer from iPhone to Mac. Once complete, two-way sync will be restored via iTunes. Unlike the MobileMe sync, you can turn off the iTunes bookmark sync to Safari without losing bookmarks on you iPhone.

I'm not responsible for lost data. Back-up everything before you start this process. Do NOT sync the iPhone until the process is complete. Others may have some shortcuts or improvements to this process [eg, convert Mobile Safari plist to Mac Safari plist instead, or use XSLT or shell script improvements, etc.]. I welcome those suggestions and will re-post them. Leave a comment or send email to me at mobilemind (at) pobox.com.

Here's how I managed to save my iPhone bookmarks, recover them to Mac, and switch off MobileMe bookmark sync without losing data. Now I just use iTunes for Bookmark sync.

1. Download iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor by clicking on the big honking icon on that page. (I sent him $10 USD because it worked so well for me. Send him a few Euro if it works for you too.)

2. Launch the Extractor, open a backup and extract “iPhone OS Files”.

If your current back-up is questionable or to deliberately use an older version of iPhone bookmarks do the following. First make a copy of the current back-up, and put it in another location. Then use Time Machine or your back-up utility to find and restore a "good" previous version of the backup, from:

  ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

Remember that “~” is shorthand for the user home folder (Home icon in Finder, or Shift-Command-H).

3. Save the “iPhone OS Files” extract to a new folder, and find the Bookmarks preferences file. It should be in:
  newfolder/iPhone OS Files/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist

4. Convert the binary preferences file to XML. Open a terminal window and go to the folder with Bookmarks.plist. Then issue this command:

  plutil -convert xml1 Bookmarks.plist

Leave the terminal window open, you'll need it in a minute.

5. Open Mac Safari and do File > Export Bookmarks… to save a backup. We'll use this if anything goes wrong, and it's a handy reference example of the bookmark file format. I saved mine as “Safari Bookmarks.html” and put an extra copy in the same folder as “Bookmarks.plist”.

6. Get or make some shell magic with grep to reformat the XML plist preferences file into a rough approximation of a Mac Safari bookmarks import/export file. I found a great bit of code from Dave Taylor here.

I took Dave's example and removed some stuff like the sorting (more on that in a minute). Then I added the necessary opening and closing tags for a Bookmark file, with some comments. Here is my shell file for you to download: plist2bookmarks.sh

7. Save the shell script and make it executable. Save the shell file to the same folder as the converted Bookmarks.plist file. Then go to the terminal window and make it executable by you (the owner) and your group.

  chmod 774 plist2bookmarks.sh

8. Execute the script and direct the output to a new file. I called my output file "MobileSafariBookmarks.html" (no spaces to make the shell command easier).

  ./plist2bookmarks.sh >MobileSafariBookmarks.html

9. Clean-up the “MobileSafariBookmarks.html” in your favorite editor to make it match the folder hierarchy of your iPhone Bookmarks. I used Dreamweaver CS4 and TextMate to open my reference file ("Safari Bookmarks.html") and the new file ("MobileSafariBookmarks.html"), bouncing back & forth to make sure I got the tags right.

Have your iPhone handy to check the folder structure. That helped me as I did edits. The comments put in by “plist2bookmarks.sh” should help you understand how and where to create folders (or nest them).

Keep in mind that the iPhone has a few built-in bookmark folders and bookmarks, like the “History” folder and the bookmarks for “Yahoo!”, “Google”, “AT&T MyAccount”, and “iPhone User Guide”.

10. Prepare to import Mobile Safari Bookmarks into Mac Safari. Make sure you have a back-up of your Mac Safari bookmarks. Then open Safari, use Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks, and delete ONLY your bookmarks. Do NOT delete Address Book or other items. In m case, I selected Bookmarks Bar and deleted all the items there. Then I selected Bookmarks Menu and deleted all those items.

11. Import the Mobile Safari Bookmarks into Mac Safari. Use File > Import Bookmarks… to import “MobileSafariBookmarks.html” as cleaned-up in step 9.

12. Verify Mac Safari against Mobile Safari before you disable MobileMe sync of bookmarks. Remember, that will delete the iPhone bookmarks. Carefully check the list and URL addresses of the bookmarks now in Mac Safari against the list and structure in Mobile Safari on iPhone. Quit Safari on the Mac when you are done. Quit Mobile Safari on the iPhone too.

13. Take a deep breath and delete the bookmarks on Mobile Safari by disabling MobileMe sync of Bookmarks. On iPhone, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then, under Accounts select your MobileMe account. Change Bookmarks to OFF. iPhone will warn you about deleting bookmarks. That is OK, because we now have them in Safari and will soon sync with iTunes from Mac Safari back to iPhone.

14. Disable iTunes automatic syncing for devices to allow us to make changes. Do not connect the iPhone yet. Start iTunes. Open Preferences and select Devices. Check the box that says "Disable automatic syncing for iPhones and iPods". Close Preferences.

15. Connect the iPhone and change iTunes to Sync Safari bookmarks. After the iPhone connects, it may sync anyway. That is OK. Select the iPhone in the left panel. Then select the tab labeled Info in the large main panel of iTunes. Scroll down to the shaded bar for Web Browser and check the box next to Sync Safari bookmarks.

16. Apply the change to sync. Click the Sync button in the lower right corner of iTunes and wait.

17. When the sync is done, all the bookmarks moved manually from the backup to Mac Safari, will be restored to the iPhone. From now on, the iPhone and Mac Safari will sync via iTunes. Changes on one will be reflected on the other after each sync. As an extra bonus, the MobileMe "push" should be a little shorter and a little less battery draining, since bookmarks are no longer synced over-the-air.

If you want, you can even turn off iTunes bookmark sync and add/restore your original Mac Safari bookmarks, either to keep things separate or to merge them back to iPhone later.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, technology, tips

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IMS withdrew the QTI 2.1 spec, despite some existing implementation and information going back to 2006 that is was imminently ready for use. The official IMS wording seems to be toned down a bit, but there is also a clip from early wording on Rowin Young's blog. Other early opinions ended up on list servers like this. I've fired up a Google alert on this issue and will be tracking it. Meantime, one of my co-workers at Questionmark and a key contributor to QTI 1.x, John Kleeman, has penned, Why QTI Really Matters.

Check it out and watch for updates here. I expect a few more QTI experts and pundits from other specification bodies to have some observations soon. However, an unnamed organization with a litigious nature may be unwittingly suppressing discussion.

Labels: elearning, learning, LMS-LCMS, technology

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Exciting times for elearning standards. Lots of discussion about two unrelated events. First, SCORM “cheats” are published and the community rallies to address the issues. Secondly, and coincidentally, the IMS recently withdrew the QTI spec from further work by IMS membership. I'll follow-up on the IMS QTI issue in a subsequent post (likely linking to more detailed information from others).

What is SCORM Cheatlet?
I coined “cheatlet” as a portmanteau of cheat and bookmarklet (itself a portmanteau of bookmark and applet). A bookmarklet is a browser bookmark that uses the javascript: protocol prefix instead of the typical http: prefix used for web pages. This allows one to create a bookmark that runs JavaScript code in the browser.

I dove into bookmarklets when developing my iPastelet utility for iPhone in the summer of 2008. It immediately occurred to me that this technique could be an interesting way to hack/cheat the SCORM JavaScript API. Thus was born my implementation of the cheatlet. It worked easily and nearly immediately. By clicking a bookmark, I could send a score to an LMS. I tuned it to send a time, a status, and in a sinister turn, close and then nullify the API object handle to prevent any legitimate data from overwriting the hacked score.

Cheatlet Concept goes Public
In late August 2008, with a working demo of this code in hand, I sent it to major players in the SCORM world, including a major ADL contract agency, major LMS vendors, SCORM code suppliers of various types, and tool vendors. Many vendors responded that it was simply an instantiation of a hack to a known issue. One indicated they were well aware of this and raised the issue early on to discourage the AICC from deprecating HACP for the JavaScript API, that vendor was Questionmark (Disclosure, I started work for Questionmark in January 2009).

I seemed to be more concerned than others. In late August, I submitted a paper on the issue to the LETSI SCORM 2.0 Workshop, without disclosing precisely how to implement or code the exploit. The paper, Security Before Features was discussed online and at the Pensacola meeting in October 2008, but little seemed to happen as a result. Work continued on SCORM 2004 4th Edition without any API changes.

Cheatlet Example/Running Code Goes Public
Flash forward to a few weeks ago. Working completely independently, Phillip Hutchison had a similar moment of inspiration and crafts his own SCORM “cheatlet” bookmark. The big difference was this included a working cheat as a link right in the blog post (chealet linked since removed, but code is still available by request to Phillip). Soon this issue received broader attention. Reaction and opinions flew about the internet. Plateau proactively sent a letter to its US government LMS customers about this issue to help calms their fears. Ironically, I think this also drew further attention and discussion.

Defense Approaches, Work-arounds, Opinions
Soon after the example code hit the internet, opinions flew between experts on twitter, email and blogs. I posted a overview of the issues on the Questionmark blog, along with a follow-up post on general defensive strategies, including some specific solutions to support those approaches.

• The Importance of Security and Integrity of Performance Data
• Defense in Depth: Security for SCORM and Beyond

The ADL posted workarounds for some aspects of the vulnerability. Both are more clearly aimed and HTML/JavaScript coders, but that may be exactly who read this blog.

• SCORM Content Vulnerability Workarounds by Jonathan Poltrack
• Securing Your Assessments, Excerpt from Carnegie Mellon Best Practices Guide for the Design and Development of SCORM Assessments (means to make “View source” more challenging)

Some feel quite strongly that SCORM has never been suited for more than the lowest-stakes elearning events. I feel that stakes must always be viewed as a continuum. Furthermore, I believe it is far easier to consider the high stakes end of the spectrum first and back-down as necessary. In any environment, is incredibly difficult to start with little or no security and patch your way up to a secure system.

Others may see it differently. I'm sure there will be plenty of opinions. I'd say my views on this issue tend to align with Phillip Hutchison (whom I've never met, but respect) more than Mike Rustici (whom I've known & respected for many years). I'll come back and update this post as they emerge. Other opinions include:

• SCORM security (two kinds of SCORM people), Phillip Hutchison, Pipwerks
• SCORM Security - Some Perspective, Mike Rustici, Rustici Software

Labels: elearning, LMS-LCMS, SCORM, technology

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I just read Clay Shirky on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Substitute “LMS/Central Training Department” for instances of “Newspaper/publishers” and it is a real wake-up call.

Read it. Think about it. Who are the real-world, radical change-observing “pragmatists” and who are the in denial status-quo with incremental-change “revolutionaries” in your organization?

Are the people who say that the now and the future is in informal learning, collaboration, mobile and social networking the revolutionaries,or the pragmatists? Are the experts those wizened experienced people who say learning & training have been and always will be structured, pre-defined and centralized, (and they often add or else it is wasteful and inefficient).

Look outside your windows (or preferably Mac) there is a whole world (-wide web 2.0 ) happening. What the heck, check it out on your phone or Xbox or …

See past the matrix illusion of the Central Committee's integrated-firewalled-siloed starts-and-stops-at-your-enterprise LCMS-LMS-authoring-tool including Centralized Succession Planning, now with connect-to-your-actual-cubemate-Social-Networking™.

Got it? Good. Now go read two Jay Cross posts, New Roles for Former Trainers and then Agile Instructional Design. For bonus points tonight or tomorrow, twitter (+2), text (+1) or email (+.05) a few colleagues and collaborate on how you can apply scrum techniques on your next training or elearning effort.

Feedback? Like this kind of post? Let me know, I've got a few more cans of elearning willy pete in the armory.

Labels: elearning, informal, learning, LMS-LCMS, technology

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Via Daring Fireball, I learned of “The Setup”; a series of posts/interviews with techno glitterati describing their work setups. A much cooler (and computer-centric) approach than my early December post, What if… MTV Cribs for iPhones.

So far The Setup covers Alex Payne (of twitter), YACHT (I can't describe YACHT), Gabe Newell (of Valve videogames), Steven Frank (of Panic Inc and Transmit fame) and John Gruber (the famous fantastic Daring Fireball and Markdown maker).

Labels: technology, tools

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It'd be cool if there was a “geek work cribs” that showcased the preferred tools of geek celebs (and minor celebs). If there is, I don't know about it. Nonetheless, we all find posts and pages to that effect here and there. Recently, fellow geek (and elearning celeb) Aaron Silvers kindly posted a page-by-page list of what's on (and no longer on) his iPhone. There are some cool ways to do things like this that I'll share too.

First, get an account (or two) at iusethis.com, but do NOT populate it- yet.

• Mac OS X - http://osx.iusethis.com
• iPhone - http://iphone.iusethis.com

Next, get AppFresh, a Mac OS X application that helps you keep apps, widgets, preference panes and plugins up-to-date. Conveniently, it also connects to you iusethis account for Mac OS X. Run AppFresh, and it will create a list of your Mac apps and check for new version. Add your iusethisaccoutn via the AppFresh preferences.

Once the list is populated by AppFresh, you can easily click to add items to iusethis.com from AppFresh. Now you have a readily updated list that you can share as a page or RSS feed (see link at bottom of your apps or event page on the iusethis site).

The iPhone section of the site isn't quite as auto-magically updated. I'd love to see AppFresh or something like that scour your iTunes directory to populate such a list though (hint). Fortunately, the folks at iusethis do make it easy to find iPhone apps on their site or add your favorites while their forms pull in data from the iTunes App Store.

Now for the mobilemind iusethis lists:

• Mac OS X apps: http://osx.iusethis.com/user/mobilemind
  Recent changes: http://osx.iusethis.com/feed/mobilemind
  
• iPhone apps: http://iphone.iusethis.com/user/mobilemind
  Recent changes: http://iphone.iusethis.com/feed/mobilemind

Once you are signed up and sharing like this, iusethis will also identify like-minded neighbors by way of your application set. Note that the respective OS X and iPhone sites also have overall lists for New, Interesting and Top apps.

Hey Aaron are we iusethis neighbors? (PS- I too dropped Appigo To Do for the freeRemember the Milk app.) Poor Appigo, first To Do dropped for the free RTM app, and now AccuFuel has been replaced with the $4.99 Gas Cubby. All good apps, just a matter of preferences and $4-$5.

Labels: Apple, technology, tips, tools

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For some time Adobe insiders and followers have been talking about XFL, a package file format for Flash (here, here, here and more in search). XFL combines XML and some binary assets in a zip archive. Currently Adobe CS4 applications use XFL as an interchange format.

How does this impact rapid elearning? Office automation tools are also using package file formats, such as the somewhat controversial Microsoft Office Open XML format. This is the metaformat that subsumes the underlying markup languages for word processing, presentation and spreadsheet content.

Taken together I suspect we will see the rise of many custom workflow and “homebrew rapid elearning” applications. It will be easier than ever before to use common zip and XSL tools to take “SME content” in .docx and .pptx files and transform them into XFL. From XFL to published SWF is an easy step for CS4, and will allow for expert tuning/enhancement in Flash itself. That sort of tuning isn't possible in current tools.

Corporate developers and elearning shops will likely create their own tools and workflows like Mohive and CourseAvenue Studio, but optimized for their market, clientele, content, style, work cycle and requirements.

Still others developers will bypass tools like Adobe Presenter, Articulate Presenter, and iSpring Pro, Rapid Intake ProForm, instead creating their own tools. These tools will likely work with specialized, optimized and more structured Word or PowerPoint files/templates, but also provide more optimized workflows and optimized content.

I think the opportunities for more flexible rapid elearning development will increase. The race is on for Articulate and Adobe to improve their offerings with richer tools and more instructional design savvy built-in. Wonderful as it is, Articulate Engage could be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Likewise, CourseAvenue Studio and Mohive will need to expand the value of their workflow, repository and shared template capabilities.

Elearning professionals can contribute design skills to these new custom processes. Those with Flash skills will appreciate content flowing more easily from Word and PowerPoint to Flash, allowing upstream production efficiencies while still resulting in “raw” Flash files that can be enhanced and enriched with animations, effects and AS3 code.

It will be interesting to observe as the likely home brew solutions, open source tools, tool kits and SDKs emerge– all making it easier for content to flow from office automation tools to Flash source code file formats. I suspect other package file formats will also emerge and contribute to interesting solutions.

Labels: Adobe, elearning, learning, technology

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Tom Kuhlmann of Articulate (and the consistently fantastic The Rapid Elearning Blog ) just posted: Is Google Making Our E-Learning Stupid? I love the phrase, the idea, and am certain the mere phrase resonates with everyone in the industry.

I might have taken the article in another direction, but, as always, Mr Kuhlmann makes it great, digestible and practical. He provides rapid elearning tips and approaches that transcend any specific tool (and apply to more than just rapid elearning). Bravo Tom.

Labels: learning, technology, tips

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I saw that 9to5 Mac picked up a story on iPods as mobile training devices for soldiers to learn new spoken languages. I immediately recognized this from some demos I'd seen from Carol Wideman of Vcom3D. Fantastic to see that this is in the field, well-received and effective. We'd met several years ago and a NATO training council meeting and this was mostly a concept then.

The story is written up on the Fort Hood 1st Cavalry web site, including some pictures of the ipod with battery and the wearable holder/case. (Note- The webmaster must like the yellow/black Purkinje effect.)

I'm glad to see Vcom3D get well-deserved recognition. Now its time for some forward-thinking corporate trainers to look at off-the-shelf and thinking-outside-the-box solutions like this too. I'm sure there's plenty of time- and cost-effective training applications for virtual characters that model real language and cultural gestures-- and plays back in common digital video and interactive Adobe Flash formats.

Labels: Adobe, Apple, learning, technology, virtual worlds

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Playing around with the Cuil search engine earlier this morning…

versus

Fortunately my typical vanity search did find me. Even more interesting is that Cuil quickly “learned” about SCORM in just an hour or so. Click either image to see more current results.

Labels: learning, LMS-LCMS, technology

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Here is a new utility web page to easily create javascript: bookmarks (bookmarklets) that paste a custom text string into a web page form in Mobile Safari on iPhone or iPod Touch– http://mobilemind.net/iphone.

On iPhone and Touch, that page will automatically re-direct to http://mobilemind.net/___, which includes all the instructions and code needed to make a bookmarklet that pastes text (an “iPastelet”).

On the iPhone/Touch, Save an iPastelet provides a form to enter your text string and a button to update the page URL. Then you need to save the bookmark, then immediately edit it to remove the http:// prefix and mobilemind URL. The directions on the page explain it all.

On desktop machines, the page does not re-direct, but instead takes you to the “classic” iPastelet Maker that I posted last December. The desktop browser version of iPasteletMaker creates a bookmarklet for you to save in your desktop browser (Mac or Win) and then sync to your device via iTunes.

This approach might be a little more handy if you already sync broswer bookmarks and want to create a bookmark Scrapbook folder with lots of these.

Thanks to Erica Sadun for the original bookmarklet code and inspiration. Special Thanks to Craig Hockenberry (IconFactory / Twitterific, Twitterific for iPhone), Joe Maller (Transmogrify), Joe Hewitt and the iUI team (http://code.google.com/p/iui/), and Ankur Kothari (Make the most of the iPhone SDK) for inspiration and examples.

Labels: Apple, technology, tips

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LETSI is soliciting white papers on SCORM to help identify the issues and ideas that are key priorities for the learning and training community. The submission deadline is August 15, 2008 and more information can be found on the LETSI web site SCORM 2.0 page or in the PDF file LETSI White Paper Solicitation on SCORM.

I think this is important, as we could be at the cusp of a make-or-break situation for evolution (or revolution) of learning and training infrastructure. Much of the current e-learning and LMS infrastructure is grounded in the learning and training approaches of the 1990s ('80s? '70s??). By comparison, today's technical and learning environment is much more “read-write”, collaborative, social and nomadic-- all while being more personal and individualized.

Excuse me while I meander, ramble and eventually get to the point of why it is important.

Recently, I realized I have been unwittingly (and somewhat weakly) channelling the thoughts of Dr. David Wiley regarding the isolated "read-only" static nature of LMS-centric training, by mentioning this in conversation and scattered bullet-points in presentations over the last year. I discovered this thanks to Brian Lamb, who I have never met, but who I remotely and greatly appreciate via his blog abject learning.

Brian in a passing credit mentioned that David provided a lot of meat for many of his own presentations last year, and then lead me straight to Dr. Wiley's 2007 presentation Openness, Localization and the Future of Learning Objects. If you can't take the time to watch/listen to the whole presentation, I'd strongly encourage you to advance the slides and time marker to the following points:

• 30:37 Engineer invasion and the next slide, Technical standards soup (Tom adds, Mea Culpa-- and I'm not even an engineer)
• 15:27 Education vs Everday (a more cogent expression of some ideas I discussed at AICC in Hamburg last month)
• 13:27 Innovative in 1995 and next slide, Education v Everyday (revisited)

If that doesn't inspire you to respond to the call for papers, perhaps it might get the attention of Dr. Wiley or Brian Lamb.

E-learning isn't completely broken, but current specifications and infrastructure don't match how we live, learn and work.

Interoperability specifications can't completely fix that, but maybe, maybe, the specification efforts can be oriented to enable and facilitate more effective and more congruent approaches. Too often they seem resistant and brittle towards innovation.

I'm certain that LETSI looks forward to learning from and sharing your white paper ideas.

Labels: events, learning, LMS-LCMS, technology

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I saw my friend Aaron twitter a question about this topic, so I thought I'd pull together a quick post with some resources for those with a Mac (and 1-2 for Mac or Win Firefox) and general tips. Briefly the tips are:

• Test using Safari with User Agent set to Mobile Safari
• Preview with iPhoney application for more context & rotation testing (add latest agent string)
• Use Firefox extensions User Agent Switcher, Web Developer and Firebug, and Firesizer
• Use iUI code with CSS/HTML/Javascript for iPhone-style interface
• Visit the Apple Web Apps Development Center and Apple iPhone Dev Center
• Check out the Google Groups iPhoneWebDev
• Register for iPhone DevCamp 2

Safari- Go to Preferences and check the box for Show Develop menu in menu bar.

Then you can use the menu Develop > User Agent > Mobile Safari 1.1.3 – iPhone. That will allow Safari to present itself to website (and your code) as the iPhone web browser. Hovering over a menu option will also display the full User Agent string.

iPhoney- iPhoney from MarketCircle is basically a shell around WebKit that acts like the iPhone browser, Mobile Safari. It does support rotation, but isn't exactly like iPhone (address bar can't scroll (but can be hidden), it does add vertical/horizontal scroll bars in some 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.

Tip: I found that I get more "iPhone-like" results with many sites by having iPhoney use a custom user-agent. The User Agent string below matches exactly what a web server sees for my iPhone user agent with the current firmware, whereas the iPhoney returns a slightly different version (Mobile/1A538a). 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/4A93 Safari/419.3

Switch User Agent- Firefox users (even those already using Firefox 3.0) can use the User Agent Switcher extension to also mimic the iPhone web browser user agent, with the same User Agent string as above.

Firefox extensions for Javascript development- While you're at it, you may also want to get a couple of other Firefox extension that are generally useful for web development– the Web Developer extension is from the same author as User Agent Switcher, and the latest Firebug extension beta release seems to work well with Firefox 3 (and help a lot with debugging). Firesizer isn't is compatible with Firefox 3 (yet) now, and it allows you to quickly switch Firefox to different screen sizes... helping you preview an iPhone sized window of (or even test other web sites & apps at common sizes like 1024x768).

iUI- iUI is set of CSS, HTML and Javascript that hails from Joe Hewitt of Facebook, who also originated Firebug. iUI is available from the Google code site, and includes code to provide a more iPhone-like look and feel to your web applications while providing the ability to handle page orientation changes (rotation between landscape & portrait views).

Apple Developer pages and Google Groups- There are a bunch of resources on the Apple site and there is an active iPhone Web Development Google Group too. Visit the Apple Web Apps Development Center and Apple iPhone Dev Center. Then check out the Google Groups iPhoneWebDev.

iPhoneDevCamp- Finally, there will be a second iPhoneDevCamp at the Adobe offices in San Francisco. It is scheduled for August 1-3 2008, and you should watch the official iPhoneDevCamp 2 website for more information.

Labels: Apple, Firefox-Thunderbird, technology, tips

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Unsurprisingly the CEA (CES organizers) have banned Gizmodo and are looking at further sanctions.

CEA's take on CES Gizmodo prank: Banned!

This results from the earlier presentation-fouling pranks, Gizmodo CES horseplay reported all over the web.

Lesson learned for presenters & trainers, prepare for the juvenile-- turn off IR ports/devices/remotes you don't need or tape them over, or make sure they provide some basic security. Require pairing for BlueTooth devices, turn off the "Discoverable" setting, and so forth. Mac users should pair their infrared remote or even disable it if not used. Wired connections are preferred.

I'm almost surprised there haven't been widely-publicized incidents with wireless mics at conferences, yet. I guess we'll all need secured ultra-wide band wireless microphones soon.

Labels: events, rant, technology

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Reading blogs has become a primary source of news for me. I sorely missed FeedDemon when I switched to Mac. Then I found about about NetNewsWire, but dawdled on buying it. Surprise, BOTH are now free. My favorite apps list just got bigger and free-er. I'll expand on the details of each below.

Feed readers make your blog reading more productive. Yes, I know about Bloglines and Google Reader (and other web-based readers), but these desktop readers are my preference for a few reasons. Those who live in the browser or bounce between machines may prefer web-hosted solutions. However, putting me in front of a browser, leaves me itching to hit a few favorite bookmarks, check AdSense, frequent flyer miles and other BBADD ideas (Browser-based Attention Deficit Disorder). Plus, lately I've been getting paranoid about having ALL my data at Google, so I spread the data to make the harvesting a little harder, even if that expands the password/identity hassles/risks.

The "fog of surfing" quickly crushes my plans for focused RSS raids in Firefox (apologies to Carl von Clausewitz). In contrast, I find that FeedDemon gives a comforting and quick "customized newspaper" my favorite feeds. NetNewsWire has a little different interface paradigm, but I can still sail through feed faster than plain surfing, Firefox Sage extension surfing or using Bloglines and succumbing to BBADD temptations.

UPDATE 1/11/07: Nick Bradbury himself discusses, Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader? (Note he does NOT make it a all-or-nothing argument like some).

Windows RSS Reader: FeedDemon now $0
FeedDemon comes from the genius of Nick Bradbury, who also developed the original HomeSite HTML editor. I bought FeedDemon years ago when he sold it directly. I've always loved the newspaper view and the innovative blog-search-results-feed. The search lets you create a "feed" that is the dynamic results of searching across blogs-- VERY handy when you want to stay on top of emerging news on a few related topics of interest.

Mac RSS Reader: NetNewsWire now $0
This one is a little newer to me, but I'm liking it a lot after 2 days of heavy use. NetNewsWire has the features you'd expect and a nice capability to open posts in either your preferred browser or the built-in browser. Opening things in the built-in browser reduces the clutter, while still letting you easily read the full-featured verison of the posts. Besides an nice Outlook-eque 3 panel view, the NetNewsWire browser pane also includes sharp, useful thumbnail views of each open "tab" of blog posts content.

Both readers really shine if you use the feature to clean-out infrequently read feeds (literally NetNewsWire "dinosaurs"). For further blog-reading productivity boosts, you can become a FeedDemon speed demon by applying the Inbox Zero techniques from the 43 Folders organizational site to RSS reading. I've tried it and it works great!

Speaking of BBADD behavior, have you seen the Gizmodo CES horseplay? I'm not sure I'd be proud of that.

Labels: blogs, technology, tips

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Here is the promised new year follow-up with applications I really like and use.

Open source stuff [Windows & Mac]: Firefox 2, Flock, Thunderbird 2, FileZilla, and Audacity
All of those worked great on Windows and great on Mac. In 2004 when still using Windows for daily work, I dumped IE & Outlook and switched to Firefox and Thunderbird and have never regretted it. [OK, Calendaring needs work. Will Sunbird/Lightning ever break out like Thunderbird?]. In 2005, I even switched my wife's machine and my father-in-law to Firefox/Thunderbird. Works great, with no trouble for me or them. Soon, I'll blog about my favorite must-have Firefox extensions and Thunderbird extensions.

In 2007, these open source apps eased the transition to Mac. I just copied directories over and installed the Mac version and voila, it all worked. Well, I didn't bring Flock data over from the Windows machine-- I just installed it after Firefox and let it pick up my bookmarks from there.

With FileZilla, I did need to re-enter my servers and passwords, but I work with only a few FTP sites. However, all the application UI and workflow experience transfers back-and-forth just fine. Over time, I expect I'll go buy YummyFTP since it is incredibly fast, efficient and more Mac-integrated. In terms of features/version, Audacity lags a bit on the Mac, but it worked fine for my needs. TUAW recently posted a call for Mac developers and hopefully it will catch-up soon.

Finally, Flock turned out to be a great tool for blog surfing and blog writing and social surfing. It is especially strong with del.icio.us, Facebook, flickr, and ma.gnolia and twitter.

Password Managers [Windows, Palm, PocketPC]: Ilium eWallet $30
I used Ilium eWallet with Windows and a Palm V... then PocketPC... then a Treo. It worked great and provided a fantastic way to secure and manage tons of passwords, PINS, access codes and WPA codes. With the availability PocketPC and Palm applications and synchronization it also provided a way to securely access information on Windows or take-it with me.

Password Managers [Macintosh, iPhone]: 1Password $30
I ordered a MacBook Pro in May both to jump on the Switcher bandwagon and in anticipation of having a more iPhone-friendly platform. Much to my surprise, I came to love the Mac and abruptly ended my initial affair with the iPhone after 6 days. 1Password from Agile Web Solutions turned out to be both a password manager and the friend that helped reunite me with iPhone (OK Steve Jobs and a $200 price break helped too). 1Password manager is great because it secures data leveraging the Macintosh keychain system, works simultaneously across multiple browsers (Camino, Firefox, Flock, Safari), and syncs with the iPhone via a clever use of encryption with a Javascript bookmarklet that keeps your portable data secure.

XML, XSD and XSLT [Windows]: Altova XMLSpy $500
I would hate to do any XML heavy-lifting without the latest version of Altova XMLSpy. If you're going to make or edit XSD schema files or make or edit XSLT, just get it. Generally, the Professional version is recommended. I've never needed more, but I haven't worked with WSDL. The Altova site offers a confusing array of offerings, but just look for the basic version of Altova XMLSpy Professional [30 day trial here]. It is expensive, but well worth it.

Manipulating any sort of text file [Macintosh]: TextMate $60
TextMate sings with any sort of text file you can think of editing. Built-in bundles and extensibility make it fluent with everything from Actionscript to XML. It is a ninja at replacing, reformatting, realigning and re-anything with text-based content in a single file or across a multi-file project. Using Textmate I've munged .htaccess, Javascript, PHP, plain text, robots.txt, sitemap.xml and big gnarly text file hairballs of data, with preternatural alacrity. Be sure to check out the author's blog and the Textmate in Action screencasts for some great tips and speed editing demo's.

Blog writing [Windows]: w.bloggar [donationware]
w.bloggar on Windows was my favorite, but fell into disrepair by October 2006 (and didn't resurface until a year later). I have not used it since late 2006, but development seems to be on once again. The December 2007 update looks promising and I may pop it on a USB thumbdrive for some portable client-side blog editing on Windows Machines.

Blog writing [Macintosh]: Ecto $18
Ecto rocks! I've been using Ecto 3.0 since it went alpha and am very happy with it. Ecto offers round-trip editing with WYSIWYG and HTML source views. You'll find tons of handy features to paste URL links and automate entries. Ecto really shines if you contribute to 2 or more blogs, and want local editing, saving drafts, and automatic publishing. One cool feature I've come to appreciate is the way it automatically submits the post title and a TinyURL link to twitter

Sitemap Utilities [Macintosh]: Rage Google Sitemap Automator $30
If you're responsible for 2 or more public-facing websites with at least dozens of pages each, then get Rage Google Sitemap Automator now to improve your search engine optimization and indexing. It is rare for a niche need and a solution to exquisitely and harmoniously unite as a solution. Rage Google Sitemap Automator does just that and kicks asterisk. Point the Rage Sitemap Automator at your web site and it scours the bugger for every possible page that could be submitted to Google sitemaps or Yahoo Site Explorer. Then you can easily add filters to set the refresh frequency and priority of whole batches of those pages (or even exclude some). It is highly configurable letting you easily add extensions to exclude (or include), which came in very handy for adding pages with a ".pl" extension from a site that uses YaBB. Sitemap Automator also does more than typical sitemap generators by letting you easily make batch changes the sitemap without rescanning the whole site. If you're responsible for 2 or more public-facing websites with at least dozens of pages each, then it is well worth the $30 to get Rage Google Sitemap Automator [or at least use the trial version].

Labels: technology, tips

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Year transitions mean two things in the media (and the blogosphere)– old year recaps and new year predictions. I predict that I will get to prognostications for 2008 in a future post. I also predict I will love these things in 2008. Meantime here are some great web tools/services I had the pleasure of using in 2007.

Jott
Call an 800 number and send a transcribed message via SMS text or email to your contacts or a group lists (or even twitter, tumblr, a blog or group, or remember the milk). Jott is fantastic for me. It is quite good at speech recognition for transcription, and Jott offers the option of including a link to original audio.

I stumbled on to this service via the task manager iGTD and a since-abandoned integration that allowed you to Jott to yourself and have to-do items automatically show-up sorted, classified, and scheduled in your task manager. Now I am thinking it will be a fine way to avoid entangling myself with the new 2008 Washington State Law against texting while driving. (I admit I've done this at stop lights and clogged-up off-ramps, but at freeway speeds or in moving traffic, txt'ing and driving is insane.) With Jott, you just speed dial an 800 number and speak what becomes that SMS saying/sending "I'm still stuck in traffic" message to an individual or group.

OpenDNS
Basically, OpenDNS runs a network of high-speed DNS servers. Things like MySpace pages and Facebook may call content from tens of different domains. Every millisecond needed to resolve each of those domains slows down the page loading. OpenDNS is free, fast and has nice instructions to setup a Windows or Mac computer to use it or even setup a router. SOHO or small business system administrators can also use it as a sort of filter to reduce phising scams, filter "adult" sites, provide some 'branding' for DNS errors and more. Simple to setup up, and for me, faster internet at home.

Plaxo
Yes, this former scourge has become indispensable. Remember when Plaxo seemed like a virus, always pinging you about someone who wanted you to update your contact info. All better now, they are much less invasive and more useful. I do contract work and my client has me using Outlook on equipment they provide. With Plaxo, I'm able to sync calendar and contacts between Outlook, Thunderbird, Google Calendar, Palm Contacts, Palm Calendar, and eventually Macintosh Address Book and iCal. and iPhone. I'm calling it a service, but in this case I also use Plaxo client add-ins for Outlook, Thunderbird and Address Book / iCal.

Pobox
Imagine having the same home email address for 10 years. I have had just that, despite using 3 different dial-up services, 2 cable companies and a DSL service. Pobox is a sort of email forwarder that gives you a stable address for receiving (and sending) email, no matter how many times you change the forwarding account where it ultimately lands to get read.

Can you also also imagine having 99%+ of your spam stopped at the server and never reaching your "real" address, during that entire time? Pobox does that too. The Pobox spam filter set is amazing-- it can be very automatic or let you fine tune the settings. It combines already powerful filters like Sender address verification, SPF, black hole listings, SpamCop, Cloudmark, HELO tests, and even region-based flagging and bouncing. Bouncing is great, it makes your pobox email look failed/dead to spammers. I used the basic service at $20/year for several years, but have upgraded to more expensive service for the last few years.

Family members have been happy with the $20-- even those "backending" it with Gmail (already excellent spam filtering), because they feel free to switch services anytime without having a forced address change. Me? I'm happy to have 7 inbound email addresses from 3 different domains filtering through Pobox to one forwarding account. I just did a report and in the last 30 days there where 0.001% false positives where mail was blocked that should not have been blocked. Meantime, I got 4 spam emails in the last 7 days, and see only 6 "possible spams" that were held and not bounced.

PublicVPN.com
I'm getting paranoid about WiFi hotspot security. PublicVPN gives me a nice no-fuss solution for securing transmission of personal data over public wireless (or wired) connections. I tactically purchased a 30 day subscription to cover time when I was going to be out-of-town at conferences. As my subscription approached expiration, I got a renewal notice offering 10% off. I deferred a bit and once again renewed to cover 2 more conferences. PublicVPN service worked great from St. Louis, Orlando, Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, San Jose and Seattle. When the next renewal notice (and discount offer) arrived, I re-upped for a full year at $55. It feels good to support a relatively local (Oregon) company and secure my data. All this without the hassle of adding VPN firmware to a Linux-based router and configuring/maintaining it, OR buying an expensive SOHO-solution.

Bunches of things Google
Google Search, obviously. But I've also benefited from and used Google Alerts, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google AdSense, Google Sitemaps (Webmaster tools), Google Analytics and Google Talk.

Hmm, that's a lot of my data. Can you see why I'm hesitant to jump on with Google Docs for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation. So far, online spreadsheet EditGrid (online spreadsheets) seems just fine and offers VERY iPhone-friendly version. Plus I'm not chained to Microsoft Office, and am really enjoying using Apple iWork '08 with Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets & light data, and Keynote for world-class presentation capabilities-- and all for a total investment of $80.

That reminds me...

Apple Quick Tip of the Week via web or iTunes
Short podcasts/video-podcasts (most are less than 1 minute) that give you easy-to-follow and very useful tips for Mac OS X and Apple software. <blockcomments>Jeff Burton</blockcomments>

Oops, looks like I squeezed in some references to applications. Seems like that could be a whole other post. Look for that one soon.

Labels: technology, tips

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Here is a quick tip for Firefox: Enter Ctrl-L company Ctrl-Return. [Use Command-L and Command-Return on Mac.]
Bam! Firefox completes it as http://www.company.com and goes there.

Here is how it works. You use Control-L to automatically place the cursor in the URL address field and highlight all the text. Then type just the company name for a website (say "Amazon") and do a Control-Return.

Firefox completes it as http://www.amazon.com and goes there. This doesn't work for "non dot com" domains like .edu, .gov, .org etc. So I still have to fully type http://mobilemind.net for instance or start typing m-o-b-i-l... and use autocompleting when it finds a match.

This combination works great because the Open Location shortcut (Control-L or Command-L) does the effort-saving act of getting the cursor in the address bar ready for a new address, and the URL-entry + completion shortcut (Control-Return or Command-Return) skips the "Google-search + 'I feel lucky'" default behavior of entering just a word in the address bar. This combo also bypasses issues with proxy servers or use of the OpenDNS service, which might otherwise bring up some sort of results page to disambiguate your entry.

I now use this all the time. It saves fishing for the mouse to go to the address bar, and it is s a wonderfully handy speed combo when you're behind a proxy server on the corporate intranet or at a hotel hotspot. No mouse fishing and you avoid that disambiguation/search results page.

Labels: Firefox-Thunderbird, technology, tips

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OK, I just watched the last 2 segments of VH1 100 Greatest Songs of the 90's on Tivo, so please forgive the back-dated back reference. Maybe I should have gone with "D'oh, FINALLY Got Blogger Backlinks Working."

Using RAGE Google Sitemap Automator has been all the rage with me during the holiday break, but I kept learning from Google Webmaster Tools that I was getting pages with weird links ending with %3C$BlogBacklinkURL$%3E. It turns out that Backlinks have been broken here since forever. However they are now fixed, thanks to the informative (but 2 year old) post I found at A Consuming Experience, Display links to your posts via Blogger Backlinks, Icerocket Link Tracker etc. If you're having a problem like this, you probably have a customized Blogger template, so you should see the section titled Blogger: backlinks for custom templates.

Watch for some real content to appear here soon.

Labels: blogs, rant, technology

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Two cool updates with cool videos too. First off, the OLPC Give One, Get One 'XO' laptops are on their way. I got an email note on Saturday morning indicating mine should arrive by January 15. Coincidentally, I just stumbled on to a fascinating video with XO designer Yves Behar describing key features. Watching the video and understanding the thoughtfulness of the design, I couldn't help but think of A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink. Subtle features and textures abound and combine to an air of quality even at a low price. Who knew Bono and The Edge did the start-up sound for the XO? Who new the camera could easily link up with a simple malaria self-test?

What a segue. the Malaria No More bed nets made it to Mali Africa almost 2 weeks ago. Soon after they arrived, Elliott Masie posted a few interesting videos about the impact the nets will have and even some information on how local health advocates engage in learning and training. Here's an interesting video on the train-the-trainer and communications for the "Health Relays:" Field Lessons. There are other interesting observations and videos on the Learning Gives Back blog , that address everything from differences in mobile phone culture, to holidays, and even a bit on the Amazon Kindle.

One more bit on the One Laptop Per Child. Read what children and teachers are saying about OLPC and the XO at Learning Around the World. If you miss the December 31, 2007 deadline for Give One, Get One and are still interested, there are other Ways to Donate.

Labels: learning, Masie, technology

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I used Google Trends to plot search popularity of Authorware, Toolbook, Lectora, and Captivate since 2004. It may not be a direct correlation to sales or interest, but there seems to be some consistency with gut-level reactions for industry positions. Authorware trending down since 2004, Toolbook relatively stable but lower, and a pretty good horse race between the seemingly indirect competitors of Captivate and Lectora. A sample image follows below, along with links for some other interesting plots.

Authoring tool comparative search popularity plots

• Authorware vs ToolBook: http://www.google.com/trends?q=authorware%2Ctoolbook
• Camtasia vs Captivate: http://www.google.com/trends?q=camtasia%2Ccaptivate
• Lectora (Publisher) vs Captivate: http://www.google.com/trends?q=lectora%2Ccaptivate
• Authorware, Camtasia, Lectora, Captivate, Toolbook: http://www.google.com/trends?q=authorware%2Ccamtasia%2Clectora%2Ccaptivate%2Ctoolbook

Obviously, the comparisons depend on having a rather specific and unique search term. I unsuccessfully tried doing a comparison of AICC and SCORM, but things like All India Congress Committee (AICC), Antwerp International Cat Club (AICC) and other AICC's left me feeling like it was inconclusive regarding LMS specifications. Through my work with one AICC (Aviation Industry CBT Committee) I've already seen seasonal variations in web traffic due to All India Congress Committee and election cycles. However, I wonder if occurrence/popularity of a common word (e.g., Captivate) is relatively stable in the common usage and in that case product references might drive dynamic changes to indicate realtive changes.

Labels: learning, technology

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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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Not sure if I got frustrated, creative, generous, or all of the above. I made a web form called iPastelet Maker that lets you easily create custom bookmarklets that paste text into web forms on the iPhone. Use it to create bookmarklets for common recurring entries, like user ID's, email addresses, IP addresses, host names, etc. You might even create a bookmark folder called 'Scrapbook' and keep a bunch of common text snippets there. If you have a few services/servers you log-on to and use the same email/ID's over & over this can be really convenient.

Since they are bookmarklets, they obviously only work in a browser, and work best in Safari/Mobile Safari. However, it is best to create them with your desktop browser (preferably Safari on Mac and IE on Windows). Then, use iTunes to sync your bookmarks over to the iPhone and voilá.

It's free stuff, so feedback is welcome, but support is nil. Thanks to TUAW and Erica Sadun for awareness, code and inspiration.

Labels: Apple, technology

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I've had an Amazon Kindle for a week now. In fact, I've even read a book already and passed it on to friends and colleagues to get their feedback.

It was kind of cool to get the jump on folks like ZDNet and have real Amazon Kindle review done by last Monday. Their "initial impressions" reviews just showed up in my inbox today. However, last Monday, Elliott Masie shared his take on the Kindle in a video posted for the Masie Learning Consortium and also posted a PDF of my review. Recently the same material was also shared with the broader learning community via the Learning TRENDS Newsletter he publishes. Here's a quote from the December 5, 2007 entry:

Kindle Reader from Amazon - Perspectives: We have been testing the new Kindle Reader device recently released by Amazon. This is the latest in a series of e-book readers that we have seen and reviewed at The MASIE Center. While the new device has some flaws and usability challenges (including the absence of a touch screen), it is an important "baby step" towards the dream of more accessible digital content. Just as Apple's iPod and the iTunes site popularized the concept of buying and downloading a song for a dollar, Kindle is aimed at doing the same for books. Our Learning CONSORTIUM will be doing a series of experiments with the Kindle and other e-Readers to see how they could best be integrated into corporate learning. You can take a peek at our work by going to http://www.masieweb.com/kindle.

Elliott has a nice 6 minute video overview on the page at the link above, which also has a link to a PDF that he has referred to as, "[Tom King has done] a more technical, in-depth "first look" at content models for the Kindle as well as human factor issues." Cool and not even entirely self-promotion for me. :-)

Speaking of promotion, if you plan to purchase a Kindle, please consider using the link below so that I will receive an Amazon Associates referral fee. Thanks.

Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device

Labels: learning, Masie, technology

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<rant> Dear WebEx, please help your product become less sucky. We live in a web world. People use different web browsers, different Java versions, different OS platforms, and some people even (gasp) have smartphones. I had a horrible experience with your product today. Bad enough for me to spend the time writing this rant. Bad enough that I will now to my best to cancel or avoid any meeting requiring me to join a WebEx meeting.

I think we've all had other challenges and bad experiences with your product in the past. For me this relationship has got to end unless you can change. I 'll no longer budget 10 extra minutes to get into a WebEx meeting, and then be distracted for the first 15 minutes of my co-workers actual meeting as I install, cancel, uninstall, reinstall, check and change browser settings, get Java versions, then download WebEx Meeting Manager, deal with WebEx support and eventually give up on the WebEx meeting.

The recurring Java and ActiveX hassles I had with the WebEx Windows versions a few years were a recurring mild annoyance. The fact that it is 2007 and WebEx still offers only a 2003 "PowerPC" version for Mac was the last straw. You've known about this for quite awhile. It's embarrassing. You are no longer the only one scaleable and available. Have a little respect for yourself and your victims/users. You are Cisco now for heavens sake. It is not me, it is you. Yeah, sure, maybe we can still be friends.

PS: WebEx competitors, no need to get all smug and happy yet. I'm still looking for something that will exceed WebEx features and works reliably and well on Mac and Windows and Linux, with at least 2 browsers on each platform.

PPS: Besides geeks like me, a couple hundred thousand kids will get OLPC Linux machines. They're selling USD $2 million worth of those things each day for the last few weeks with Give One, Get One. Look into getting those kids and their governments a solution. Might even be good for your business. Even Microsoft is starting to think that way about OLPC.

PPPS: The world has a couple billion mobile phones. Pretty much enough for each of us who can use one, to have two. We use them. A lot. Please figure out how to easily, centrally (?automatically) mute the call from the guy walking past the leaf blower or breathing like Darth Vader. When you've got that licked, see about getting at least a slide show or still shot screen sharing on 3-4 types of Smartphones-- a couple million of us will be happier.
</rant>

Labels: events, learning, rant, technology, virtual classroom

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Last night on TV I saw am advertising spot for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative that featured Masi Oka (Hiro Nakamura from NBC's Heroes) and then I went and checked online and it looks like the offer is extended through December 31, 2007. If you'd still like to try out the Give One, Get One ("GO,GO") offer, then follow the link or see my previous post. I'm also including links here if you want to learn more about the OLPC initiative or the technical specs of the 'xo' laptop.

While we're all in a thankful and charitable mood, how about helping to stop malaria for $10?

In many developing areas a simple mosquito net can help save children's lives by protecting them from nocturnal mosquito bites (ok, technically mosquitoes are crepusclar instead of nocturnal, but who knew that). Insecticide-resistant mosquitoes are emerging and a cheap $10 net can be quite effective at protecting vulnerable young children when they are most likely to be bitten. Malaria No More is a non-profit that helps procure and distribute such nets. I was lucky enough to be able to donate at Learning 2007 and have gone back and donated again since then.

Malaria No More - Education and Donation Information

Labels: events, learning, Masie, technology

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I'm probably late to the party, but there is an awesome charity opportunity for anyone supportive of the OLPC One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative. I just found out about this through the JiWire newsletter, and it seems to be a great thing for anyone who is both involved in elearning and a charitable individual. Here's the link to Give one, Get One. This offer runs until November 26, 2007 for US and Canada. Now the description from the JiWire Newsletter

After several years of development, MIT's One Laptop Per Child initiative to put computers in the hands of children in developing countries has started to become a reality. And now that manufacturing has started, there's just one week left to give an OLPC laptop to a child in a developing country, and get a matching one for yourself (or for your favorite kid). For $399, the two-for-one deal also includes a huge sweetener: a full year of T-Mobile Hotspot Wi-Fi service, a $360 value in itself (normally $29.99 per month with a 1-year contract). If you already subscribe to T-Mobile, why not take advantage of the special deal, then cancel your current plan? Throw in the $200 tax deduction for the donated laptop, and you may even come out ahead of the game. Not to mention you'll have a great gift for a lucky kid, and do a good deed. Note that is will also be the ONLY chance that US buyers have to purchase an OLPC laptop directly.

Just remember to sign up by Monday, November 26 at LaptopGiving.org. While you're considering it, check out Laptop Magazine's review of the OLPC hardware, especially the 8-year-old's viewpoint!

Labels: events, learning, technology

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Short notice, I know, but there is an Adobe online eseminar today (November 14) at 11:00am Pacific time that will essentially repeats the DevLearn discussion panel on Authorware End-of-Development issues that occurred last week at the Adobe Summit. Also worth noting is the availability of preliminary results from the AICC Survey on Authorware End-of-Life Issues and Impacts.

• Adobe Panel Webinar on Solutions for Authorware Users › Wednesday, November 14, 2007 11:00AM - 1:00PM US/Pacific
• Preliminary Authorware Survey Results [PDF available at that link]

As I understand it, the panel discussion will be recorded. I will post a link to the recording area when or if it becomes available to me. The PDF with the AICC survey information has data from about 40 responses. Since last Thursday there have been about a dozen additional responses. The AICC post indicates that the survey will be open for data collection until November 16, 2007 and provides a link to access the survey.

Labels: Adobe, events, technology

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Because of Navisite, what was supposed to be a 14 hour over-night change for 5dollarhosting.com became a 34 day tragic comedy of errors, with 200,000+ sites besides mine down about 3x longer than expected. Not a big deal for me; I have my own email elsewhere and you all surviced fine without this web site available. But perhaps this was a good lesson from a bad example of communication and collaboration.

After repeated postponements Navisite still messed up royally on the relocation that was supposed to happen from 10pm Friday night to noon Saturday (Eastern time), instead starting late, encountering challenges, messing up on communication and taking from 10pm Friday until 2:30pm Sunday mid-morning Monday.

What was scheduled as 14 hours expanded to 41.5 60+ hours including the shift-off of Daylight Savings. Adding insult to injury Navsite was ill-prepared with IT security systems with a claimed DDoS attack happened early Sunday too. Oops. [In hindsight, reading the playback, I wonder if this 'attack' was actually just lots of traffic their own servers generated due to configuration issues]. Recurring missed deadlines, calls after-the-fact, and weak assurances after trust was lost didn't help anyone. Read the saga at 5dollarbackup.com/blog if you like.

It's an old lesson, and a good reminder for me- Trust is important. Be prepared. Make commitments you can keep. Communication is critical; stay in contact with your customers.

I am going to give 5dollarhosting a chance to treat customers like me better than the poor way that Navisite has treated them. That said, I do have calls in to AN Hosting, BlueHost, DreamHost and Host Gator. Maybe this will be an opportunity to switch off of Blogger to another blogging system, and maybe even try out Joomla or Ruby on Rails.

Let me know if you have feedback on hosting services, blogging systems (not clients though, I use ecto 3 and LOVE it), or Joomla and lightweight content-management systems. I think Mobilemind is due for an upgrade in late 2007 or early 2008.

UPDATE: Monday, 8am Pacific time– Internet technology resilience proved itself again yesterday. My blog was only online briefly Sunday, but feed readers picked up the RSS. Servers were online and offline sporadically for hours at a time. Even with the server down I was contacted via LinkedIN and twitter messages from friends and colleagues. Thanks to Aaron and others for their empathy and advice. I just got an email from a reporter in Boston who wants to talk to me. It is a very connected world.

UPDATE 3: Thursday, November 9– (Yes, that is update #3, update #2 got lost due to Blogger being unable to reach downed Navisite servers on Monday.) It is 6 days later and 16,000+ web sites are still down. Go Navisite. I'm just not saying where they can go. :-)

Labels: blogs, 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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Artist, inventor, innovator, collaborator and colleague Philip V.W. Dodds passed away on Saturday morning. Please help me recognize and celebrate his accomplishments and the lives he continues to touch.

I tried to write this yesterday and just couldn't. I truly believe the elearning community would not have SCORM as it is today without Philip's contributions as a visionary thinker, organizer, architect and evangelist. He was a man of art and a man of science. He loved technology, yet took great pride and active participation in true and faithful restorations to his historic home. He was drawing electronic circuits on blackboards at an early age, did R&D at ARP Instruments and Kurzweil Music, and led the charge to make CD-ROMs and sound cards a standard part of personal computers through his efforts with IMA and the MPC "Multimedia PC" standards efforts in the late 80's and early 90's.

I'd encourage you to learn more about him real soon now, courtesy of a page available through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Meantime, here is what Elliott Masie had to share about Philip in a message to the Learning Consortium:

"What are we saying to each other?"

That was a single line, spoken by the sound engineer at the end of Close Encounters of a Third Kind, as he played chords and a friendly alien spaceship played music back.

The role was played by a young sound engineer who was spotted by Steven Spielberg and given the on-screen role to be the interface between these two worlds. That man, Philip Dodds, was still young and inventing, as he passed this Saturday morning.

Philip Dodds was the Chief Architect of SCORM and the force behind sharable and reusable content. He was deeply involved in the evolution of interactive multimedia and expanding the possibilities for learning via technology.

If you use a Learning Management System, author an interactive learning module or talk about the future of Web 2.0, take a moment to thank a man who you probably never met. Philip's work was KEY and CRITICAL to the exciting world of learning, knowledge management and collaboration that we take for granted.

Philip's dreams were to create a global set of standards and specifications that would allow content to be searchable, reusable and expandable.

Philip, we thank you for all that you have done and we'll keep asking that question: "What are we saying to each other?"

With respect and sadness,

Elliott Masie

P.S. wikipedia reference at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Dodds

UPDATE: I cross-posted this to the AICC News Blog, and received a comment that suggests we share our memories of Philip there. If you'd like to post a comment on this topic, please do so at the corresponding post on the AICC News Blog- The Passing of Philip V.W. Dodds.

Labels: learning, technology

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The AICC (Aviation Industry CBT Committee) is hosting a discussion forum on Authorware End-of-Development and developing an Authorware Impact & Issues Survey to help assess the impact and move towards solutions for heavily-invested corporate customers. A presentation used for live discussion is available from the AICC site, as are the AICC Meeting Minutes with additional notes on the matter.

If the Adobe end-of-development of Authorware will have significant impact for you or your organization and you might have helpful feedback or are looking for information, then please visit the Authorware End-of-Development Discussion Forums.

The AICC deadline for feedback on survey questions is October 9, 2007. See this AICC News Blog entry for information on participation.

Labels: Adobe, learning, technology

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It seems like just a month ago (ok 2 months ago) that Apple sent me an email with information on the first iPhone Tech Talks. Now more iPhone Tech Talks are scheduled during October and November for Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Atlanta. As a bonus, despite the proximity to his residence, I can assure you that my friend and anti-fanboy curmudgeon Jeff will not attending the Minneapolis session.

See Apple iPhone Tech Talks for details.

• Boston, MA 10/09
• Philadelphia, PA 10/11
• Washington, DC 10/12
• Seattle, WA 10/22
• Minneapolis, MN 10/25
• Atlanta, GA 11/05

I'm excited to be going to Learning 2007, but sad that the iPhone Tech Talk in Seattle conflicts with it.

PS: Yes Jeff, I do have an iPhone once again, even if I am not sorry that I returned my initial iPhone after 7 days. It did help that it was now $200 less. Note that unlike others, I am NOT whining about price slashing. I love the new price, and I paid activation twice and a re-stocking fee once-- unlike the loudest whiners. Also, unlike them, I'll cheer when the price goes down again. So there. Don't complain about what you paid then or others pay now. The parable of the workers in the field strikes me as somewhat relevant. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius? -- see Mathew 20.

Labels: Apple, events, technology

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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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As a Masie Fellow, I participate in monthly Masie Learning Consortium calls hosted by Elliot Masie. This month's call was on Learning in 2012. I won't give away the store and undermine the value of Consortium, but I'd like to share a few interesting thoughts from the discussion of what learning organizations and training will be like in 5 years.

I heard some trends on the call that people are both observing and hopeful for these trends continuing. One trend (or goal), is moving training departments from a cost center to a revenue & performance contributor; integrating what was "training" into performance, knowledge, collaboration & compliance integration. This may take a variety of forms.

An additional trend was the increasing role of leaders in leadership development. More organizations are seeing their own leadership as critical in being active participants, presenters and resources in leadership development training.

Another one of the many trends discussed was the move to shorter & tighter e-learning modules and transitioning of learning modules into performance support tools. I couldn't agree more and I think this is reflected in all the Rapid Elearning and SME-authoring trends and tools we've seen in the last 4 years. That said, there will always be a need for fundamental skill development, and it is my opinion that performance support and SME-authoring are not the most effective approaches for fundamental skills development.

Elliott also made some predictions that he stands behind and are quite clear. The predictions focus on disruptive (to me, enabling) technologies that will undoubtedly impact organizations in the next 2-4 years. They are Multi-touch and haptic interfaces (like the iPhone uses), ubiquitous mobile device with parity in broadband connection speed relative to current desktops, and mobile devices with "big" high-resolution display capability (it may be in the form of wearable, virtual or projected screens or ???).

There was tons more talked about and it wouldn't be fair for me to publish it all here. So if you are a Learning Consortium member and missed the call, be sure to visit the members site and check out the recording later (hint: login and scan the page or use search to find 'podcast'). Who knows, your organization might already be a member as many big corporation are, or your organization can consider joining.

Labels: learning, Masie, technology

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I stumbled on to a great little untold story of a coaching success. In early August, I finally got around to watching the Walt Mossberg & Kara Swisher interview of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from D5 last Spring (free iTunes video podcast here, but you can probably find it elsewhere too). First off, it includes some old video in the intro with a little skit from 1984 with Mitch Kapor and a very young Bill Gates. That said, the intro continues and it takes 8 minutes until the interviewing really starts. The fulll 90 minute video is definitely worth watching for anyone who spent 10 years or more working or playing in the Windows or Mac ecosystem... maybe some good history for Gen Y's too.

For me, the interesting surprise came 01:26:00 (88 min) into it. Steve casually mentions the Apple one to one program, which I had never heard of before. For $99 a customer can register for a single membership that allows up to 1 hour of 1:1 training each week for a year. (OK, technically it is 50 minutes to 1 hour, but you can ask your lawyer or psychiatrist how that works.).

In just 1 year of operation the one-to-one program scaled up to an annual run rate of 1 million hours per year. ALL of that training is delivered in Apple retail stores. That is a LOT of 1:1 coaching. It also seems to shatter the myth that elearning is the only way to effectively scale training.

Here's an exercise for the reader:

1. How many hours of 1:1 coaching could or should your organization realistically scale to deliver?
2. Would you consider 1:1 coaching formal or informal learning?
3. How could collaboration tools, social networking and web conferencing help it scale even better?

Comments gladly accepted.

Labels: coaching, informal, learning, 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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Apple just sent me an email with information on iPhone Tech Talks that are scheduled for

• Los Angeles, CA 08/02
• San Francisco, CA 08/24
• Chicago, IL 08/28
• New York, NY 08/30
• New York, NY 08/31

It looks like an interesting day,and I will admit to a small amount of "return-ers remorse"

Bring your notebook, your code, and your iPhone After a morning of in-depth presentations and demonstrations, you'll work with the experts to design, code, debug and test your solutions on iPhone. Access to your code is required.

Of course since I no longer have an iPhone and I'm not in L.A., San Francisco, Chicago or NYC, I won't be going. I'm sure Jeff will notice the conspicuous absence of Hudson, WI as a venue-- and feel no disappointment whatsoever.

Labels: Apple, events, technology

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I just got back from the roving Adobe on AIR barcamp event in Seattle. The bus is cool, the APIs are cool, the AIR product/environment is cool, and the whole event approach is cool. It really struck me as a "2.0" seminar, in the "Web 2.0" sense- early feedback from users/participants, user-driven, high-tech, effective and appealing UI, adaptive, editable, lots of APIs and mash-ups (Flikr images, twitter feeds, JSON APIs and geo-tagging with GPS location data).

It was both organized and ad hoc. Both a tech-y learning event and a corporate mark-com session. A great chance to learn and see what's been done, work with experts, expand your network, and/or submerge head-down in the wireless network if you need to get a little business done online.

I really like that I came away with all the same materials and content that I would have had at a "1.0" seminar at a downtown hotel, BUT it was something that had community, something that will have its own lifecycle and a sort of harmonic sustain. This approach is something I could interact with and engage as it was on its way here, and something "sticky" that I'll want to check back in with and follow as it goes forward. Those are the things that you don't have with classic seminars-- and I'm also going to monitor the Google code site with examples and check out the twitter and camera live-feeds as they wind their way to Vancouver, back to Portland, a week-end diversion to Las Vegas, and then an event in L.A. (then Dallas then Denver- check a map first next time guys).

Good luck to Adobe with AIR and to the remote and local participants who join in the experience. Even if you're not into the product, you should check out the approach and think about creating your own mash-up like this for training and collaboration sessions-- its really quite effective. I'll be editing down some video interviews I did with the Adobe team and then submitting that to the Masie Learning Consortium site next week.

Labels: events, learning, technology

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A short list of the reasons why my iPhone went back to AT&T on Saturday.

1. Couldn't accept meeting invites on it.
2. No Cut/Copy/Paste.
3. The keyboard.
4. Not enough fine tuning control over email:
• Can't control size of email initially downloaded
• Only checks at pre-defined intervals; 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour...
• Doesn't put things in "Sent items", instead you automatically cc: yourself on everything
5. No indicator lamp or LED- can't tell at a glance if I have voicemail/email/SMS messages-- or even if the thing is powered on.
6. No encrypted password vault or 'eWallet' utility (I depend on this to 'remember' things like seldom-used low-stakes passwords, etc)
7. No video out; can't use it with the cool display glasses I recently bought.
8. No removable memory or 'mountable storage'; can't use it to transport files. The SanDisk folding SD card + USB that I use with the Treo has spoiled me.
9. Lack of 3rd party applications/extensions.
10. No "museum mode" for the iPod features; most of the training things I want to do I can do better on a video iPod or desktop.
11. No Adobe Flash.Yet?
12. It's good, borderline great, but there HAS to be a better one coming 12-18 months from now.

Labels: Apple, technology

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Already my close friend and personal curmudgeon has scoffed at my switcharoo (see his comment here). I have little to comment on his comment, other than to share that perhaps Microsoft provides a most excellent operating systems for the type of person who shuns human contact.

But seriously folks, here is a log of computers I've owned since 1985. In most cases one PC or handheld replaced another of the same type, but there were periods of overlap (eg, the PowerBook 180 soldiered on to 1996).

Some personal favorites were the Apple //c (hot rodded with a memory board), the Mac SE that got me through grad school, the PowerBook (my first laptop), the SmartBook (amazing value 'Wintel' machine like a PowerBook, the Palm Vx (still sweet for its role), and all the "serviceable workhorses" called ThinkPads.

Stinkers? There were a few in the "What was I thinking" category- the '93 Gateway that we managed to use grudgingly use until '97, the Newton (did you say 'Newfoundland'?), the HandSpring Visor (translucent blueberry plastic? uggh), the iPAQ h6315 (that they dared to claim was a phone, except it locked-up routinely while a call was ringing in) and the Treo 600 (non-removable battery and volatile storage, but I was desperate after the HP "phone"). The late model PDA iPAQ (h4150) was almost Palm Vx-like, but added WiFi, very cool. The oldest iPAQS were hot stuff at the time, but in hindsight the dual-PC card "sled" was more like a ridiculously sized toboggan. Oh well, here's the list in all its glory (or embarrassment).

1985
1)Apple IIc (256K) 1MHz 65C02

1987
2) Apple Mac SE 2MB/40MB 68020

1993
3) Apple Powerbook 180 8MB/80MB 68020
4) Gateway Intel 486-33 16/285

1994
5) SmartBook II 486-66 32MB/250MB

1995
6) Newton MessagePad 120 StrongARM 110 162MHz (sold after 90 days)
7) SmartBook IV 486-100 64MB/500MB

1996
8) ChemBook Pentium 133 128MHz/1GB
9) ComTrade P-150 128/4

1997
10) HP 320LX Handheld SH-3 12MB/4MB

1998
11) ThinkPad 770 P-II 233 256MB/5GB
12) Palm III 2MB 8MHz DragonBall

1999
13) HandSpring Visor Deluxe 8MB 16MHz
14) Sony VAIO 490 P-III 600 256MB/20GB

2000
15) ThinkPad T-20 P-III 700 256MB/10GB
16) Palm Vx 8MB DragonBall EZ 20MHz

2001
17) Compaq iPAQ 3650 32MB ARM 206MHz
18) Compaq iPAQ 3670 64MB ARM 206MHz

2002
19) Compaq iPAQ 3870 64MB ARM 206MHz
20) ThinkPad T-23 P-III 1GHz 512MB/60GB

2003
21) HP iPAQ h4150 64MB XScale PXA255 400MHz

2004
22) Handspring Treo 600 32MB TI OMAP 310 144MHz (returned after 6 days)
23) HP iPAQ h6315 64MB TI OMAP 1510 166MHz

2005
24) ThinkPad T-42p P-III 1GHz 512MB/60GB
25) Palm Treo 650 24MB XScale PXA270 312 MHz

2007
26) MacBook Pro, Duo Core 2.4GHz 2GB/160GB
UPDATE-
27) Apple iPhone ??MHz Samsung ARM/8GB (returned after 7 days)

Labels: Apple, technology

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