Report from DevLearn 2007 - Part 1

I thought it was time to enter the formal blogosphere. My goal is to create an environment where I could share learnings in the elearning profession and use it as an additional vehicle to interact with other elearning professionals.

The DevLearn conference was an inspiring event where I learned an overwhelming amount of valuable information. I also got to meet some really friendly people in the field and it was cathartic getting to talk shop with my colleagues. For several years I have read and made a small number of posts to the Authorware ListServe and I got to meet and spend time with several of the experts from the community.

Major learnings from the conference:

• You can build a Flash container for Captivate that allows communication between the applications as long as you use short one line commands. You can do this using two methods, either by using Javascript calls to the external interface function in Flash, or by embedding a flash file with the one line of code in Captivate every time you would need to trigger a reaction. The latter sounded like the better solution for my needs.
• You can use Excel to edit and publish XML. I had forgotten that I could Excel to do that.
• mLearning (mobile elearning) is something to watch for in the future. Right now not that many businesses are doing it (under 10%) but there is a lot of exciting room for growth once the barriers of standardization and pricing is overcome. One university in Japan currently has courses that students can take via their phones.
• There is a need in the market for training material on how to produce elearning content using Flash.
• For some reason Adobe does not seem to be focusing on marketing Flash as an elearning tool. They consider it a tool where you can add content to elearning, but not as a tool for creating a course from start to scratch (or using Flash as the container for the course). I am not sure if they are just trying to focus on marketing Captivate, they were more concerned with addressing the needs of Authorware clients, or if they seriously do not know how much high quality elearning content is created with Flash (look at the winners for the DemoFests for the past few years that used Flash). It will be interesting to see if they continue with this strategy.
• This ties a little into the bullet above. One of the keynote speakers (author of the Medici Effect - Frans Johansson) presented a case that some of the most innovative ideas have come from people applying ideas that you normally would not associate from one discipline to another. And that diversity drives innovation. For example there was an architect who was tasked with creating a large building complex in Zimbabwe that did not use air conditioning. He found that termite mounds are able to maintain a constant temprature in the desert, and he used the design pricipals for the termite mounds and applied them to his building. Frans' discussion also touched upon ideas reused from the past (he had photos of ipods next to radios from UK from the 50's that looked very similar in color and design). A different key note speaker, Paul Saffo an engineering professor at Stanford, had a component of his talked that focused on the theme of looking to the past in order to forecast future trends. I had an experience which tied into the concepts of looking into the past and pulling ideas from different disciplines. Jennifer Zapp, one of the Authorware gurus who has been using tool since close to its inception, was telling me about how Dr. Michael Allen developed Authorware. He looked at how dancers and artists would create training content using software. I think that Adobe could use that same out-of-the-box thinking to improve and market Flash as an elearning tool. In either MX or MX 2004 they added two different views for flash, one for developers and one for designers. I would like to propose that they build a third view, for elearning. And they could use the same process that Michael Allen used to develop authorware for creating the interface. It would not be rebuilding the wheel and it would just be repackaging Flash's existing functionality. All things Flash aside, it was interesting hearing how Authorware's development tied into the points mentioned in the key note speaker's presentations.
• Having SMEs create content can actually be beneficial to a training department. When they try to build content on their own (and most will probably have a hard time of it) it will reinforce the value of having a training staff member participating with instructional design skills. Even if you give them brief training in ID they still will need to come to you to polish their content.
• I can get content on how to teach SMEs on how to use Adobe Connect Presenter by finding courses already written by academic institutions and tweaking it slightly.
• Tom King from the AICC organization had some impressive statistics in his survey reporting Authorware end-of-development issues. You can view the report at: http://www.aicc.org/blog/.
• The sessions I was most interested in viewing were ones that introduced Flex and AIR. However I was a little bummed that they did not have any elearning-specific examples. I need just a little more to work with in order to think about how I could apply it. Still it was exciting technology, and Steve Howard and Amy Blankenship were telling me some ideas they were playing around with about what they could do with it. Here are two apps that I thought were interesting: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/book/Anatomy.html and http://dev.getoutsmart.com/os3d/demos/videoroom/ (with the latter I was thinking about having a 3D university where you could walk to the courses).
• According to what the keynote speakers were saying (and I think it is implied by the organizers since they selected the speakers) there are big changes that are going to hit the eLearning industry due to the user-generated content revolution.