A day mankind has anticipated ever since we first lifted our eyes unto the heavens…

Today, 16th July 2009 is the 40th Anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. I'd like to commemorate this by pointing you towards some fascinating sites about the event.

I've mentioned in the past that I'm a Space nut; I believe the ongoing endeavor to explore, live, and work in space to be the epitome of the human spirit and our imperative to learn and to understand that which is currently beyond out ken. I also share a birthdate (but not the age) with Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon and utterer of the infamous "One small step..." epigram. And because this is the E-Learning Curve Blog, I'm also going to discuss this event in the context of learning technology, particularly the role of asynchronous media in supporting cognitive events. But I'm not doing that last bit today; instead, I'm going to sit back and enjoy the events of July 1969.

Now read on...

The first site you can check out is the "official" NASA 40th Anniversary website, which has a variety of informative resources that will teach you about the historic mission. When you 'land' (sorry) on the page, you'll find a brief of the historical events surrounding the mission, as well as a listing of anniversary events for those of you lucky enough to be close to these commemorations. To supplement its own coverage, NASA has also posted several videos of user-generated videos detailing peoples' impressions of the lunar landing and why it was so important to them.

Next Google Moon. When you search for Apollo 11 on Google Moon, you'll find basic information such as the astronauts' biographies. Once you zoom in on their landing site in Mare Tranquillitatis (the Sea of Tranquility), you'll find nearly 20 landmarks that describe everything from where the TV camera was placed, where Armstrong's famous first footprints were left, to where location of Eagle, their Lunar Module. It also has images of all the landmarks. It's a nice way to learn more about Apollo 11.

The Project Apollo Archive is the most extensive collection of high-quality Apollo images, featuring images scanned for Eric Jones' Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Many image and multimedia resources on this website are courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, specifically the NASA History Office, Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center. The site also features:

• Mission Chronology
• Crews
• Spacecraft
• Diagrams and Maps
• Memorabilia
• A (very tough) Lunar Lander Simulator
• Links
• Mailing Lists / Groups

Back on Earth and in the here-and-now, Steve Eves build and launched a 1/10th Scale working model of the Saturn V rocket. This is possibly the only build of the rocket that is completely re-usable, as all the stages safely parachuted back to earth (the original rockets' components either burned up in Earth's atmosphere, crashed into the Moon, or are still in orbit around the Sun).

Best of all, please check out We Choose the Moon - "an interactive experience recreating the historic Apollo 11 mission to the Moon in real time."

Using Flash, and a range of social media technologies and products, the site does an amazing job of recreating the experience of going to the Moon. As I sit here writing this blog post, I'm tuned in to the pre-launch sights and sounds. The site is Flash based, has three Twitter feeds (cleverly taking the audio from CapCom, Columbia - the command module - and Eagle) , as well as an Adobe Air-based desktop and FaceBook widget.

Fantastic.

Finally, if you're of a mischievous turn of mind, check out how The Onion is remembering Phurba Dorje, the unsung hero of the lunar landing who, according to Buzz Aldrin "...was as much a member of that team as anyone. Probably more than [Michael] Collins was."

Normal service tomorrow: just going to enjoy myself at We Choose the Moon today!
--

Rapid E-Learning Production - Supporting Applications

As we know, Rapid E-Learning is subject matter expert-centric, based on authoring or developing content with easy-to-use, ubiquitous platforms like PowerPoint & Flash, and enables content to be developed in a matter of days, not than weeks or months. Rapid e-learning does not mean taking liberties with well-established content development processes.

Rather, it is an approach to content development that enables SMEs to author content quickly and efficiently, typically using learning professionals as coaches and assistants in the process.

The two tenets of rapid e-learning are:

1. Ease of development
2. Short development time frames

The key to successful rapid e-learning is having tools and templates that make it easy for practically any expert to quickly create effective learning materials.

However, rapid content authoring is only part of the story. The end-to-end content design, development, delivery, management and maintenance cycle demands a broad range of skills (I talked about some of these here), and a number of computer applications to support and leverage these steps of the e-learning development process.

In my never-ending pursuit of enhancing performance when using the Rapid E-Learning methodology, I regularly assess new applications, tools, and utilities to assess their value in my learning and development content production procedures. Here are the applications I’m going to evaluate over the next few months. Of course, I’ll blog my views on them over that period of time. Interestingly, only a few of these apps are 'pure' e-learning development tools; the others I intend to use to facilitate aspects of the content development process, rather than to actually develop learning materials.

Serena Prototype Composer 2009
Serena Prototype Composer is an application planning, modeling and prototyping environment for non-technical users to visually define their application needs, including business processes, activities, user interfaces, requirements, and data. Models can be derived from existing resources such as Web applications and can be published as running prototypes as well as Microsoft Word specifications.

WebCAT
The Web Category Analysis Tool is an open source utility that allows designers and usability engineer to test a proposed or existing website or CMS/LMS ontology or categorization scheme. This enables knowledge managers (and instructional designers) to determine how well taxonomies, categories and learning content objects are understood by users. WebCAT is a variation on the traditional card sorting paradigm, where users are guided to generate a category tree or even a folksonomy.

Stanza Desktop
Stanza Desktop is an e-book publishing tool, designed for generate digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general Web content for a range of hardware platforms. It supports HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and Rich Text Format reading, as well as all the major e-book standards: unprotected Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, Palm doc, and the International Digital Publishing Forum's new EPUB Open eBook standard. According to the developers, Stanza is designed to to make reading on your Macintosh, PC or mobile device an “enjoyable and hassle-free” experience.

iWebkit
iWebKit is a GNU-licensed file package and content framework designed to enable those without the time or the programming skills to use the iPhone SDK to create iPhone and iPod Touch compatible websites and webapps. According to the developers, the kit is accessible to anyone - even people without any html knowledge. and is simple to understand thanks to the included tutorials. We’ll see.

Microsoft Learning Content Development System
The Microsoft Learning Content Development System (LCDS) is a free-to-use tool that enables the developers to create interactive, online courses. The LCDS allows anyone to publish e-learning courses by completing the easy-to-use LCDS forms that seamlessly generate highly customized content, interactive activities, quizzes, games, assessments, animations, demos, and other multimedia.

PowerManual
PowerManual addresses the needs of presenters, trainers and anyone who uses PowerPoint on a regular basis. PowerManual enables you to produce high quality documents in a range of formats, including Word, PDF and HTML.PowerManual enables the creation of cover pages, logos, custom headers and footers, document pagination, on-the-fly slide updating, as well as PowerPoint slidestack management.

As I said, I'll be reviewing the apps, testing and reporting on their functionality, ease-of-use, suitability of purpose, adaptability to e-learning, and so on. I’d like to hear your opinions: do you already use some or all of these tools? What do you think of them? Are you going to evaluate them yourself, based on my suggestion? Are there any other tools in the same space that are more effective?

Let me know what you think by commenting in the space below.

--

Launching from the Flash Platform

Adobe Flash has evolved considerably since Macromedia Flash was used to create animations and develop and run interactive Web-based content. According to the current developers, the Adobe Flash Platform is

an integrated set of technologies surrounded by an established ecosystem of support programs, business partners, and enthusiastic user communities. Together, they provide everything you need to create and deliver the most compelling applications, content, and video to the widest possible audience.

The Flash Platform combines tools, an open source framework, ubiquitous clients, and scalable servers (see Table 1).

Table 1 Components of the Flash Platform

Application Type	Technology
Runtime Environment	Flash Player
	Flash Professional
Authoring Tools	Flex
	Flash Catalyst
	Flash Media Server
Flash Server	BlazeDS
	LiveCycle DS

The environment enables content developers create applications and content from prototype to deployment in an integrated framework (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 The Flash Platform

In the context of Flash-based authoring tools like Adobe Captivate, the platform enables e-learning content authors to rapidly and efficiently design, develop and implement Web-based learning applications including:

• Screen recording and demos
• Software simulations
• Scenario-based training
• Presentations
• Quizzes
• Podcasts
• Screencasts

I have written about the pros and cons of Captivate in previous blog articles so I don’t intend to go over the same old ground again, but you can find out more by clicking here.

________________
References:

Adobe Website: http://www.adobe.com

--

What’s the difference between Flash and Captivate?

Question: can you briefly explain the advantage/difference between Captivate and Flash. I can't seem to find any one place that discusses this.

Well, I'm back from leave and the walls still seem to be standing, so I thought I'd return by responding to E-Learning Curve Blog reader Marvin Pyle’s query about Flash and Captivate. [As an aside, I assume you’re not the same Marvin who guided my wife and I around the Mayan site of Copán Ruinas in Honduras?]

I can see where the confusion surrounding Flash arises, and I also understand why you'd find it a little difficult to find a site that discusses this. More on the latter, later.

There are a number of facets to any discussion about Flash, Captivate, and why the tools and technologies are important to e-learning. To do justice to the subject, I will address these aspects of the subject over the next few blog posts:

• Background and Context
• Flash Player
• Flash Application
• Flash Platform
• Captivate
• Flash and E-Learning

Background and Context
Adobe Flash (previously Macromedia Flash) is a multimedia platform currently developed and distributed by Adobe Systems. Since its 1996 launch, it has become a very popular tool for adding animation and interactivity to the Web. Flash is the de facto standard tool used to:

• create Web-based animations & advertisements
• run various Web page components (i.e. menu items, drop-down lists)
• integrate streaming video into Web pages
• develop rich Internet applications
• deliver e-learning content over the Web

Flash can manipulate vector and raster graphics, and supports streaming audio and video media delivery. It is programmable via an interpreted scripting language called ActionScript (currently at v3). A range of software products can be used to create and to run Flash content. Examples include the Adobe Flash Player (which is available for most Web browsers, some mobile phones (though significantly not the Apple iPhone) as well as for other electronic devices.

Adobe Flash Player
The Adobe Flash Player is a near-ubiquitous software client used to view animations and movies, either in via Web browser or as a stand-alone player. Typically, the Flash Player runs ShockWave Flash (SWF) and Flash Video (FLV) files that are created and compiled in the Flash authoring tool, in Adobe Flex, and by using a range of third party tools and applications. And herein lies the confusion I alluded to earlier: strictly speaking, Adobe Flash is the authoring environment and Flash Player is the virtual machine used to run the Flash files: these terms have become mixed over time, and "Flash" can now mean either the authoring environment, the player, or the application files.

Flash Player supports for an interpreted scripting language called ActionScript, which is based on ECMAScript. Now in version 3, ActionScript has matured from a pretty loose script syntax to a language that supports object-oriented code.

While originally designed to display 2-dimensional vector animations, the Flash Player has become an environment for running rich internet applications (RIAs), and streaming video and audio. It uses vector graphics to minimize file size and create files that save bandwidth and loading time. Flash is a common format for games, animations, and GUIs embedded into Web pages.

The Flash Player is available as a plugin for recent versions of browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer on a number of platforms.

Next time: The Flash Platform

--

No Flash on the iPhone? I’m cool with that.

Everyone wants Flash on the iPhone.

Today I had a moment of clarity. I realized there will never be the facility to view Flash-based content on my iPhone. Probably. And you know what? I’m cool with that.

I have been an Apple 3G iPhone owner and user since the model was released here in Ireland in mid-2008. Since I have had the device, I’ve come to rely on it to manage my e-mail accounts, utilize my time, play music, video, take notes (text and audio), and generally be more productive .

I’ve Twittered, Quittered, Facebooked, YouTubed and blogged.

But for me, the inability to deliver Flash-based interactive e-learning applications on the device has been a significant source of frustration for me for all the time I have used my iPhone.

Oh, the potential that’s there, I said. What a waste, I lamented. Learning “on-the-go” – real just-in-time information-transfer just-out-of-reach, I railed, much like Lear on the heath. All that content, ready to be refactored into a dinky miniaturized format for all my learners: not to be, alas and alack.

More than anything else, my frustration was based upon a positive reading of a very ambiguous statement by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, who, when discussing the difficulties in bringing Adobe's most well distributed product to the iPhone said:

It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating… The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.*

The implication of this - and other - public utterances by the Adobe Powers That Be is that Apple and Adobe are “collaborating” on developing a Flash player for the iPhone. Logical conclusion: it’s just a matter of time before Flash appears in the iTunes App Store, ready to go.

Not on the jPhone as a Flash movie anytime soon

However, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs' comments on the popular platform, it won’t be on the iPhone any time soon.

According to Wired, Steve Jobs considers that Flash is “too slow” for the iPhone, and Flash Lite is too limited. Don’t forget that the iPhone OS is a tightly-curated closed platform: Apple call the shots. As Nullriver found out in August 2008 for example, the proprietors have no qualms about pulling iPhone Apps that they deem to extend the functionality of their hardware and software beyond what they (Apple) can control.

Wired again:

Flash does have a reputation for slow performance compared to the other popular web-embeddable language, Java. Traditionally, the best flash presentations are those coded by experts with a keen awareness of its limits—Apple wisely fears iPhones being hammered by the Internet's inexhaustible supply of badly-constructed Flash garbage.

There is a convergence of historical, cultural and practical considerations to be accounted for:

1. After many years closely working with Apple (when the Mac was the graphics & DTP creatives’ / digital media producers’ computer of choice), Adobe Systems grew initially on Apple’s support of Postscript, and later of programs like PhotoShop, Illustrator and Premiere. It can be said that Adobe is taking that relationship for granted. Adobe did not update its Mac software for more than a year after Apple switched to Intel processors in 2007. This must have hit Apple’s revenue pretty hard, as potential users stuck to their PowerPC Macs until they could acquire the compatible Adobe software
2. Traditionally, Flash has performed badly on Macs. Add to that the aforementioned “badly-constructed Flash garbage.”
3. The iPhone is not a powerful computer: it is a Web-enabled Portable Digital Assistant (PDA). I would suggest that in many consumers’ minds that to be able to surf the internet in a full-featured Safari browser on the iPhone means that it’s a “real” computer. Apple surely want to manage users’ expectations.
4. Apple is very aware of these issues. The company went as far as to include a clause in their iPhone developers' Terms of Service agreement (.PDF) that prohibits Flash from appearing on the iPhone:

   No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

The outcome of these (and other) factors is that Safari for iPhone is unable to display a significant portion of the content on the internet. Flash games aren't supported, videos can't be streamed from popular television and movie sites like Hulu and the BBC iPlayer, and websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won't work on the iPhone.

Next time: Implications for m-learning. Will mobile e-learning suffer as a result of this scenario?

______________

References:

*Source: Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

--

Salasaga: an Open Source E-Learning IDE

I recently authored a series of posts on developing e-learning content using an open source environment where I investigated the potential for creating and delivering e-learning using either free to use or freely available content authoring applications. In that series, I deliberately excluded mentioning tools to enable the capturing and post-producing demos and simulations, as the applications currently available that enable developers to create high-quality SWF-based content (such as Captivate and Articulate) come with a hefty price tag. However, that may be about to change.

Now read on.

For a while, I've been following the development path of an open source integrated development environment (IDE) called The Flame Project which

brings what Adobe Captivate offers to the Windows community, to Linux/*nix and others. The final aim is to provide functionality superior to Adobe Captivate, by enabling production of in-depth eLearning with properly verifiable results.

Flame has been renamed Salasaga, and the application is now available as and alpha release for Linux Ubuntu.



The developers' vision is

...imagine a free, easy to use GUI authoring environment that helps you create visually impressive and actually useful learning material. The short term goal for this project is to provide such an environment, and we're well on the way to a first release for doing that.

Initially similar to Adobe Captivate, but will eventually incorporate an AJAX (browser based) playback capability for advanced content. Flash has at least one serious design limitation (from my POV) making it nearly useless for comprehensive eLearning, and this appears to be addressed by the existing capabilities of AJAX in browsers these days.

As an alpha release, the IDE is not stable or functional enough to be used in a production environment, but in my view it shows great potential (particularly now that Adobe have opened up the runtime on Flash (as reported here), thereby freeing up developers to actually work with the code from the 'inside.'

Where Salasaga differs from tools like the popular Jing screen capture application, is that the former is available under the GNU LGPL, the latter is a free-to-use product created by TechSmith (of Camtasia fame). While Jing is a great little tool, it is, as the owners say "free for now" - similarly, the owners decline to state for how long the application will be publicly available. Finally, Jing content created by all its users is stored and delivered on TechSmith's ScreenCast streaming media hosting service, which locks content creators in to using TechSmith's solution end-to-end.

From an open source development perspective, this is not ideal.

The current system requirements to run Salasaga are:

Operating Systems

• Linux
• *BSD
• Solaris Nevada
• Windows XP - No development build presently available
• Windows Vista - No development build presently available

Most recent distributions of Linux should work out of the box. Debian Testing on AMD64 has specifically been reported to work.

Please note that the *BSD, Solaris Nevada, and Windows testing only gets done around package creation time.

Requirements

• Glib and GTK+ - version 2.10 or higher of both is known to work
• Pango - version 1.16 or higher is known to work
• libxml2 - version 2.6.30 or higher is known to work
• Ming - version 0.3.0 or higher is known to work

Click here to view a short demo about installing Salasaga - presumably recorded and produced using the IDE.
--