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
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.
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.
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
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”
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.
(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.



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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