The iPhone is nearly three years old. The iPod touch, two. And now, a third device in that family, the iPad will is here. All of these devices feature high resolution multitouch displays, advanced media capabilities and a great web browser, mobile Safari. All of these devices also lack the plugin needed to play the most widely deployed media file format on the web, the Adobe Flash Player.

Read my post at FloatLearning.com to see how this might affect your mLearning strategy.

I’ve just come home from DevLearn 09. DevLearn is the eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference held in San Jose. This is the second time I have gone there, with this year being the first time I have spoken at the event. It was fantastic fun, holding lots of revelations and surprises. Now, tired but happy, begins the real work. The work of consolidating the notes, following up on the contacts made (some virtual contacts finally made real… I always love when that happens) and trying to make some steps to implement the great ideas I picked up there and talked over with new and old colleagues. (more…)

I’ll have a full recap on the conference later, but for now, here is our presentation deck. Enjoy!

Additionally, here is the handout we provided to the session attendees to help them determine if an API was right for them:

The eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference is rapidly approaching. DevLearn 09 is sure to be a great event with keynotes from Leo Laporte and more. The conference this year is particularly interesting, with a complete ARG being played around a “Zombie Apocalypse” scenario. Teams, points, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more are all coming together in a very fun interactive way. It’s been great so far! I’m looking forward to see where it goes once the conference gets started.

The Iona Group will be going, with myself, Mark Tovey and John Feser all attending. Mark and I will be presenting. Our topic is about the use of APIs in eLearning. It’s a topic that is pretty dear to us. We have learned quite a bit about this through our experience getting Doctum up and running. The concept of building a resuable, sharable codebase is very prevalent in web and interactive development, but we have found that in the eLearning community it is relatively unheard of.

This could be due to a number of things, but by and large it appears to us that this may be in large part due to the fact that eLearning tools are not focused on separating content from presentation and behavior.

This practice is the foundation of of OOP and implemented in all of our work at The Iona Group. We’re happy to talk to others about it.

Here is the link to our presentation… check it out.

So, I’ve been fairly inactive here. Sure I’ve had time to tweet a bit, but by and large, I’ve been head down on a couple major projects. One, we just launched (I’ll provide much more info on that project coming soon. The other project is just starting to get fully underway, with wireframes and most of the definition docs created. Now, time for prototyping. We’re pulling out all the stops for that one… using robotics, arcade controllers, integrating augmented reality and leveraging some kick butt APIs like Google Earth! That doesn’t launch until March of next year, at a major Chicago area museum.

Beyond that, I am scheduled to participate in an upcoming exhibit featuring work by the poet laureate of Illinois, Kevin Stein. That should be a great time and allow for some real creativity!

I hope you are all enjoying a brief respite in your work right now for the dog days of summer and relaxing with a nice beer or iced coffee. I know I am. I just brewed an Imperial IPA, currently carbonating in the dark of my cool basement… first tasting, this week! Don’t know Imperial IPA as a style of beer… take a look at these beauties. My garden is coming in nicely, too, despite the Japanese beetles best attempts to eat it all!

How are you staying busy? What are you doing to blow off some steam this summer?

Has your company adopted using a Wiki or multiple Wikis for storing information, informal learning, etc.? Has it been successful in using it? This topic has been top of mind for me since returning from DevLearn08 and it is really an exciting development in how learning is changing. From formal to informal. From top down to bottom up. Peer led discussion, community grown insight. Very cool indeed!

Our company has been using a wiki for about two years now. It’s great. We store all kinds of archival data, proposals, bios, fun stuff, procedures and process stuff, handbooks, etc. It’s pretty good, really. We grew it organically and haven’t applied a lot of doctrine in the management of it.

However, it hasn’t been without it’s bumps. Getting people to use it as a primary info source, record, etc is not easy. People are used to a public folder in Outlook or a directory on a network share… but gradually this trend is fading. Beyond that, preventing empty pages or information currency problems (gardening old content and pages out) is always going to be an issue with wikis. Really though, the main issue is getting it filled up in the first place. Here are some tips I have come across in my experience in maintaining ours, reading up on Wiki Patterns and just talking to a few other people I know that manage a wiki. I am by no means an expert in this, but in a Wiki who is? I hope these tips help you, and if you have any other original ideas let me know, or join WikiPatterns and contribute!

Here they are:

1. Hold a Barn-raising! – I first heard this from Tony Karrer and have since read up on it at wiki patterns. With a small amount of planning, this could be really successful in creating a few dozen pages to get your site started. Ask your coworkers to come hungry armed with their laptops and their valuable emails and assorted PDFs and word docs they always forward on to coworkers about process, procedures and tips on how to do their jobs. Order some lunch and start editing! Soon your site will be singing with content. In a comfortable environment like this, WikiNoobs can be schooled on how to work in the system. A great side effect of this is that your pages will start to share a voice or common formatting style and that adds value and coherency to the site!
2. Have a lesser informed or rookie employee fill up some pages with scaffolded content. This content just needs to be ‘kinda’ close. Then, have that same worker send the link on to a superior or mentor for final edit. Showing your expertise can be a strong motivator for some, so by creating a basic framework for content, you are priming the pump and creating an incentive!
3. Go easy on the WikiFormatting! I like HTML. I’m used to it. Many editors are by now. WikiMarkup, or WikiText can be a bit tricky to get used to. It’s got all kinds of rules and things that can easy to implement if you haven’t spent a few years editing web pages already. But for a seasoned web designer, it can feel like training wheels. In this vein, too much focus on making things pretty can slow things down in the creation of a basic wiki’s content. I’m not sure if noticed this on the WikiPatterns site listed as an anti-pattern, but I have just really recently started digging in to this site, so it may be there.
4. Just make it a requirement. Every employee should at least be in charge of their own bio page, right? I would argue that they should not only be editing their profile/bio, but also maintaining a process page if the if they are project manager, contributing to a project’s case study if they were the designer or developer for it, you see where I am going. Simply make it a part of a project’s delivery phase and there you go. Easier said than done, right?
5. Use the Wiki’s ‘Special Pages’. MediaWiki has a “Special:Specialpages” page that lists dead-end pages, orphaned pages, basic stats, most linked to, least linked etc. These links and tools will help you, the editor, manager, etc keep your wiki fresh. Not to be overlooked!

So that’s it for now. I’m going to continue editing my Wiki, and reading Wiki Pattterns. I’m very interested how you are using your Wiki at your work, and hearing your success and trials. Let me know what you are doing with ‘em!

I just spent 5 days in San Jose. One of the managing partners , John and I went to DevLearn08. It’s a conference put on by The eLearning Guild focused on development topics and emerging technology in eLearning.
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