Techwire

This month's #LCBQ is the first with the Big Question Thought Leaders .  It's been fun working with them and has definitely added a new spark.  I'm hoping that others will join the effort.  We strongly believe the #LCBQ offers an opportunity to have something online that's like a sophisticated cocktail party.  Lots of discussion and debate around interesting questions for eLearning professionals.  We would welcome lots of discussion. This month's LCBQ is What are your Predictions and Plans for 2011? I've attacked this by looking at my past predictions, then looking at lots of predictions from other folks, and finally I get to my Top 10 eLearning Predictions for 2011 My Past eLearning Predictions You can see some of my predictions from the past in: Ten Predictions for eLearning 2008 eLearning 2.0 - Increasing Pressure Virtual Classroom Tools - Meeting Tool + Second Life Lite Authoring Tools - Captivate and Articulate Will Domin...

Garin Hess wrote a post 5 Reasons Flash is NOT dying...give me a break! and it seems like my recent post  Mobile Learning and the Continuing Death of Flash got him a little fired up.  I am fed up with people saying Flash is dying. That it's old technology. That HTML5 is the ultimate replacement. That it shouldn't be allowed to go forward. Come on! Give me a break! Garin has some good arguments on why he likes Flash as a delivery mechanism.  Probably worth visiting his blog to read them.  Let me go back to the original issue that I raised a little less than a year ago in Beginning of Long Slow Death of Flash : As a Part-Time CTO , I am continually making choices about what platforms to use, what do we build for, how do we integrate with social networks, etc. And just like a few years ago when it became clear that you shouldn’t build desktop applications anymore, I think we are hitting a tipping point where you have to question building anything that u...

I'm going to be moderating a CalTech MIT Enterprise Forum that looks at Entrepreneurial Opportunities in eLearning - basically where do we mutually see a good opportunity to create a successful eLearning Startup. I've talked a bit about this in eLearning startups : the startups in eLearning sit in smaller niches or by attacking tangential opportunities in eLearning. They are going after things like: specialized tools and content that meet particular industry or audience needs games and simulations web 2.0 approaches that leverage distributed content creation, social aspects as part of learning, collaborative learning and editing. and in Business of Learning , Future of Business of Learning ,  Future of Learning and the #LCBQ : What will the workplace learning technology look like in 2015 , there are a lot more thoughts around where learning is heading from a business perspective.  In the case of the CalTech MIT session, the attendees are ...

About a year ago, I wrote about the Beginning of Long Slow Death of Flash . I pointed to Scribd switching from Flash to HTML, and pointed to their CTO Jared Friedman saying: "We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page." Yesterday, I saw what Rapid Intake is doing with their tools to allow authoring of Mobile Learning - what they call mLearning Studio . By way of background, Rapid Intake provides tools that allow you to very rapidly input content that is composed into courses. The mobile version allows you to compose mobile learning courses using the same authoring system. You choose templates, add text, images, audio, video and quizzes, then publish for web and mobile. It can play back on iPhone, iPad, and Android with support for Blackberry coming soon. The look of the course is slightly different on ...

I’ve received some good feedback on my post Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) for Managing Course Assets . One thing is pretty clear, LCMS tools have really headed towards a kind of super Authoring tool and there's a related but quite distinct need for support for a Warehouse. The need for the Warehouse - keeping track of learning content assets across the organization has its own set of requirements. I would really like to have a dialog (email exchange) with people who are managing large collections of production and produced digital assets in larger organizations who can describe how they are managing it. Know anyone who can contribute to this? In terms of use of traditional LCMS products towards the needs cited in the previous post, Brenda Robinson and I had a good "discussion" around this - email exchange. The following all come from her, and I've interspersed some commentary: Requirement: “We need to figure out a way to get information from...

I received an inquiry from a reader at a large company that is continuously working on large projects with lots of course content running around.   They have Articulate courses, classroom courses, SharePoint sites, etc.  They have an LMS but not an LCMS.  And they currently manage all of this using what I’ve seen at a lot of companies: network drives, naming conventions, some SharePoint.  Of course, it’s still a bit of a mess.  Sound familiar? A long time ago, the goal of an LCMS was to help to manage all of these kinds of assets.  Along the way, a lot of the LCMS products on the market have become more about a kind of authoring approached with content stored in a database that is transformed into courseware.  This is valuable for large scale authoring and translation of content.  They also handle asset management, but I really have not been seeing the kind of large scale adoption of LCMS products for that purpose. Here are some specifi...

I was just asked for some examples of eLearning.  I had collected up eLearning Examples a couple years ago, but thought it was worth going back to look for more.  The following are some very good lists of widely varying examples of eLearning. Elearning samples eLearning Examples Examples of E-Learning Where are Examples of eLearning? Lots Right Here! Two examples of elearning Elearning example: Branching scenario eLearning Examples 100+ Free Websites to Find out About Anything & Everything 100+ places to learn a language online 100+ free sites for learning about business The last three provide a glimpse into the great variation that exists to learn and get help on particular topics.  While a lot of people think of eLearning as being a course, notice how few of the resources in those last three are actual online courses.  Instead, most examples of eLearning actually fall outside of that realm.