Two Underutilized Software Training Technologies

There are two technologies that are familiar to many software professionals, but somehow don’t see much use in the rest of the organization. The first technology is computer screen movie capture (aka screencasting) and the second is the ability of virtually every laptop and most video cards to support multiple monitors.

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Transforming Video: Non-destructively!

Video is far more than a publishing or entertainment medium. It can also be a powerful tool to record expert knowledge. Unfortunately, the video that emerges from a typical knowledge capture session is too fragmented, error-filled and poorly structured to be used directly in professional presentations or documentation. A video producer will have to make extensive (and expensive) edits to render the video clips presentable. Typically, the producer will use sophisticated software (e.g., Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut) to slice, dice and dramatically transform the raw material. However, conventional tools create two problems that complicate later revisions:

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Engineers Love Writing Manuals! – Really!

Problem Statement

You customized an ERP module with 15 new fields, 4 new screens, 5 significantly changed screens, a significantly different workflow, and an updated graphics ‘theme’. It takes you about 30 min just to walk a co-worker through all of the new features and methods. Now, you’re tasked to deliver end-user documentation and training materials ASAP. Your options are:

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Industrial Mind Music

Problem Statement

Remember the last time a manual told you to press a button and nothing
happened? So you spend fifteen minutes on the phone waiting for
customer service, and then you’re told you just have to press it past
where it starts giving pressure, but you were too afraid you’d break
it? These are details it’s almost impossible to capture with simple
text.

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Options for Embedding Video IN a Document File

With companies effectively using video on websites, why would anyone be interested in the fairly challenging task of embedding video directly in Word and PDF documents? In general, there is little need to embed video directly inside of office documents. However, there are situations where embedding may be the best (or only) way to ensure that the documents and video can be viewed together reliably. Some of these situations are common enough that iPOV was motivated to develop special tools and processes to make the task easier. Read More »

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Posted in Business Issues, Flash / Flex, Processing Methods, Technology | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Macro SMEconomics 101

This article was inspired by Learning Circuits’ Big Question for September 2009.

One of the fundamental tenets of management says that you must manage your business around your scarcest resource. Over the past year, priority options collapsed to just one item – money. It’s easy, in these desperate times to think that the money constraint will always dominate. However, the current crisis will eventually ease – and I believe that a new problem will become clearer – a permanent adverse supply situation for the SMEs that make ID possible. If you stick with me that far, I will argue that the situation calls for a fundamental review of the accepted instructional design (ID) paradigm – to look for design approaches that use SMEs more efficiently.

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Why we need a ‘Work Networking’ Metaphor

One of the profound joys of talking to experts is that they can ask that one question that bursts your bubble. I just had that experience with Tony Karrer – master of the eLearning Technology blog. I sent him some links to our CoSolvent Community Server, along with the blithe statement:

“We are trying to get traction for it as a service for what I believe to be a very badly underserved userspace: the no-man’s-land between people inside a corporate firewall and a closed community of stakeholders.”

Tony’s response, quite rightly, was to question my sanity. Of course, he was very polite about it:

“On the community side of things – I guess I’m surprised you say it’s underserved. My impression is there are lots of solutions, e.g., Ning.”

Umm. Yes.  Tony’s right. There are lots of solutions. I’ve had active accounts on Ning for at least 18 months and I went through the feature checklist. Technically, Ning will do most of the things that our CoSolvent Community Server can do, plus quite a few more. Other social networking tools are similar. Does that mean we’ve wasted two years on CoSolvent’s evolution? After a short recovery period, I realized that we developed CoSolvent around a set of assumptions and design concepts that we have not fully articulated – possibly even to ourselves. Now seems as good a time as any to set the record straight.

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Posted in Applications, Business Issues, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Drupal 6 Ajax Screenshot Gallery

We recently wanted to put up a carousel-style image gallery of product screenshots in our Drupal based website. After a good bit of research, I wound up with several “solutions”, but none of them did quite what I wanted; luckily I hit upon a solution by a bit of good luck simply by noticing some settings that had been enabled in the course of trying out some of the existing plugins.
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Flash development with open source tools

Why?

  • You want to do Flash work that is mostly development oriented. The environment described here will be useful for a programmer or small team using supplements from a designer as opposed to a designer working in the Flash IDE with supplements from a programmer.
  • You want a command line interface and a tool chain that can work easily with existing continuous integration and web deployment tools.

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Posted in Flash / Flex, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Direct: from Brain to Action

What are the three biggest headaches in eLearning?

  • Getting the knowledge out of the expert’s brain
  • Embedding the knowledge in the learner’s actions
  • Everything in between

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Posted in Processing Methods | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment