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 , , , , , , | 3 Comments

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

eLearning Design Patterns

The concept of a design patterns was originally recognized and popularized by Christopher Alexander to make sense of the manner in which architects (of buildings) could so easily generate their designs. He identified a design pattern as a construct that:

“describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and
then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can
use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice”

Alexander, C. et al. (1977) A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Posted in Business Issues, Processing Methods | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Zero Cost OJT for Software

  • Can you do OJT with virtually no downtime?
  • Can you train while people are completing revenue tasks?
  • Can you train with minimal time demands on your skilled employees?

If not, check out the ATEN CS228.

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

(Nearly) Instant IT Training

Problem Statement

You have a new software package with more menus, tools, windows and recipes than you can count (e.g., Photoshop, SAP or Eclipse), but the learning curve is steep. You open help files, close help files, leaf through outdated books, and constantly switch from one window to another. You copy and paste snippets and commands and you always seem to lose your place. Arggh.

Three Underutilized Technologies

This diary explores three well-established technologies that are grossly underutilized in IT training. It will share some design solution ideas later in the diary, but let’s start with the technologies as they are currently being used.

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