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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

As a reader observed in my earlier post about the CourseBuilder beta, this release makes CourseBuilder compatible with Dreamweaver 8, but does not offer new functionality (yet?).

In some cases they even offer their own LMS, in other cases they partner with LMS providers or professional services companies. Some of the systems focus more on SME-authoring, others on extensibility/customization, and still others on project management. Here are a few I’ve come across:

• SmartBuilder- This was probably the first one I remember seeing, back in 2000 or 2001. At that time they relied on Generator, but it has been updated many times since. It has several marquee clients in the Fortune 500.
• CourseAvenue- I first saw this in 2004, though it may have been around slightly earlier than that. It also has several customers that are household names. It was featured in the July 2005 Macromedia Edge newsletter.
• QMIND- This may be the newest of the bunch, but I like their product positioning which emphasizes the instructional design workflow and project/production management. They also have an interesting pricing model based on the modules used and roles.
• Mohive Toolbox- Mohive is based in Oslo, and seems to have garnered quite a few customers in Europe. I’m not sure how long the product has been around.

Are there some commercial products like these that I am missing? Let me know.

CourseBuilder for Dreamweaver 8 BETA release: We have completed internal development and QA testing for the Dreamweaver 8 update. We are fixing some known bugs in the current version of CourseBuilder as well as making sure it is compatible with Dreamweaver 8 for both the PC and MAC. We expect the final version to be released by March 1.

It will be nice to have CourseBuilder working well and stable with Dreamweaver 8. I’m also hoping for more features and tighter SCORM 1.2/2004 integration in subsequent releases.

For those who don’t know, Google Pack is a Free collection of essential software, with a few more niceties thrown in too. It includes Firefox, Google Desktop search, Norton Anitvirus special edition, Ad-Aware SE (anti-spyware) and Acrobat Reader. It also includes Google Earth and the Picasa photo organizer and more. A pretty good start.

Learners, Developers, and Managers/Administrators alike will need other basics- web browser, email, IM, word processor. Developers will likely want the latest and full versions, and some development tools. Its a similar list for administrators, but I’ll hold back on editors and development tools. For learners I’ll go on a limb and recommend the portable versions. Smaller footprint, easily installed on a desktop and offers the option of a USB thumb drive for mobile learners. Though it looks like I’m picking "lesser" tools for learners, I actually use those tools myself in many cases, and I think other developers should use them too.

I’ll cheat a bit and fill out some "development" tools in the learner category. This allows learners to create content, and gives developers a Fee or Free option; use the free "learner" tool if you like. For administrators, I’m going to just go with what likely comes with their machines and open-source where appropriate/applicable. Note that sometimes the SME (subject matter expert) can be a learner and sometimes a manager or administrator.

The table of software applications and links follows below. My own choices appear in bold.

1-Heavily customized with lots of great extensions.
2-I use this as a PortableApp running off a USB thumbdrive when it’s handy to do so.
3-Very interesting, very free, very beta.

Where is the innovation in approachable, ease-of-development for elearning? We have access to all theses cool virtual character, simulation and multimedia capabilities. Expectations run higher and higher with each new release of a millionth game or “bullet-time” movie CGI effect.

However, when we want to get great elearning done, we are still left with hand-waving, white-boarding verbal metaphor communication with a Flash expert. What gives?

Elearning had a plethora of new visual tools for creating content in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s including Authorware, CBTExpress, IconAuthor, Lectora Publisher, Quest and more. Recently, "Rapid Elearning" for “SME Empowerment“* seems to be the flavor of the month, though high-end elearning content still gets developed in Authorware, Flash or ToolBook (or general purpose tools like Java, or proprietary purpose-built tools & workflows).

I want a tool that lets me, a somewhat tech-savy instructional designer, to script and visualize 80-90% of the scenes, effects, judging, remediation, enrichment and branching of simulations and scenarios. I want to see the paths through the simulation and decision process. I want to easily prune the deep branches of the decision tree to make learning more time efficient, but leave enough breadth and depth to give in realism in consequences and complexity. I want to add points for a fast-path, demerits for recoverable false-steps and stiff penalties for hazardous decisions and actions.

I need ALL of that more than I need drawing or animation tools. A graphic designer or animator can do all those things well, and I’m not ever matching their proficiency. However, there is too much instructional design theory and design to easily, effectively communicate my intent to a programmer via a simple script or block of PowerPoint slides.

Why is this SO HARD? Can’t new tools be built now that are friendly for web deliver, and instructional design of scenario-based learning? Project management tools seem to handle contingent, critical path and parallel tracks quite well. Role-playing game & MUD tools and engines accommodates rules and scenarios.

Are there tools from other use cases and applications that can be the basis for what we need?

Here’s what got me started on this rant. John Dowdell of Adobe had a nice succinct post on Diagramming interactivity. About the same time, the ElearningPost blog had an entry The Basics of Branching Logic that refers to a Jay Cross interne Time Group blog entry on decision games that I had also read. Couple all this with the high-value long-running series of simulation posts by Clark Aldrich at the ASTD Learning Circuits Blog.

There is clearly a need for an approachable, powerful means to author scenario-based learning and decision games.

*Thanks my friend and colleague Eric Rosen for the cool 60′s-sounding terminology the “SME Empowerment Movement” as an alternative for the now ubiquitous "Rapid Elearning."

Predictions for 2006 E-learning experts map the road ahead By Lisa Neal, Editor-in-Chief, eLearn Magazine

While you’re at it check out eLearn Magazine online and the acm itself.