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).
The Elearning Events Calendar is updated with key elearning conferences and trade shows from January 2009 – June 2009. I didn’t do a good job of updating it from August-December 2008, but I’ll try to be better. If you are aware of a conference I missed, send an invite or email to events(at)mobilemind.net and I’ll add it soon after I hear from you.
I’ve added events from AICC, ADL, Articulate, eLearning Guild, I/ITSEC, IMS Global, the Masie Center, Questionmark, SumTotal, Training Magazine, and more. I’ll add links for the Plateau and Saba conferences when details become available (they are usually in Fall).
I also moved the calendar to a separate page to make it easier to read and navigate. The link to the new page is in the header navigation of my site as Events, as well as the first link in the opening paragraph of this post.
Happy New Year 2009.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Today I received a spammy-spoofy email that looked like it was from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a service I trust and respect; it moved conscientiously and cautiously in the face(book) of pressure from multiple social networking sites.
As times get tight, it will be interesting to see what happens with social networks. The pessimist in me suspects that schemes and scams will increase, as well as sincere, legitimate requests for connections and job assistance from true friends.
I hope people will be supportive of their closest contacts and colleagues. Tim Sanders’ Love Is the Killer App
As a social network, we can help stop abuse from scammers and schemers. Here is,
What I Did and you can do, too
The LinkedIn User Agreement is notable for a few key sections that I appreciated:
2. Your Rights — What You May Do
3. Our Rights and Obligations — What We Must And May Do
and
11. LinkedIn User DOs & DON’Ts
I’ll be tracking this one, since this scammer is quasi-promoting LinkedIn, via their claim to be an expert on using LinkedIn for job-hunting and encourages its use. That seems to be a conflict of interest for LinkedIn. We’ll see.
UPDATE November 21, 2008: LinkedIn got back to me on November 19, indicating they were investigating the spam. As of November 21, 2008 the alleged scammer/spammer is still on LinkedIn promoting their personal network of 2M “friends & colleagues” along with their skills in recruiting and life balance. Draw your own conclusions.
Meantime, there are plenty of ways to find experts on job-hunting with LinkedIn. We also all need to be aware of way Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody
Social Network Terms of Service and Abuse Reporting
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.
Dan Pink, author of The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need
Recently, Dan called out that I was posting video, so I figured I better get to it. I pinged Aaron Silvers about how he converted his Spring time “Bunko Breakfast” Chicago session videos. Armed with his tips, I then went off and learned a bit about Vimeo as a nice hosting alternative, with some constraints (500MB/week upload limit).
The full video came off my flip Ultra video camera
I’m learning as I go, but it seems that 5 minute chunks might be the best way to post this. Here is the first segment, where Dan provides some of the backstory on the genesis of the book.
Dan Pink: Johnny Bunko Breakfast in Seattle Clip 1 from Tom King on Vimeo.
Over the next few days, I’ll upload more segments of about 5 minutes. Once I have 2-3 more uploaded, I’ll post again with a link to the Vimeo site where I will have the videos with titles and bullet point highlights for each clip.
UPDATE:I uploaded another video, perhaps with the quality setting too high. Apologies if the high bitrate makes the video hiccup for you. I’ll fall-back to the tighter encoding for future clips.
Both of the current clips and the remaining clips will be posted to the Vimeo Channel “SeattleBunko” found at: http://www.vimeo.com/seattlebunko
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.
