Blogs

Okay folks,

So.. yeah. It's been awhile. Here's an update on what I've been up to:

Family: Mary and I are expecting our second child any day now! You hear this all the time as a matter of course, but being a father is truly the greatest thing I could imagine for my life. Watching Sophia grow into a "real little girl" has provided endless [and really, excessive] amounts of joy to our lives. It makes everything more fun, exciting, and new. Adding another to our family just keeps things interesting!

Transport: Of course, we need a little bigger vehicle. The new VW Tiguan fits the bill for us. Not too big, still Golf-like, but taller and with AWD. No diesel, though, yet, so we'll be keeping my Golf TDI for my commuting needs.

Travel: I've been traveling a bit back and forth to San Francisco but that will be put aside for awhile with the new baby. In the meantime videoconferencing will have to do, expect a post on my research in that domain soon! In July I'll be in Salt Lake City for the eLearningDevCon, one of my favorite conferences. In the fall I'm planning to attend DevLearn in San Jose. Something on the east coast would be nice too but probably not until next year.

Technology: I'm probably going to give away my giant Silicon Graphics machines and a bunch of other stuff (some of them with four wheels) in a spring fever-inspired simplification of "everything". Those who know me will understand that is something I could use (i.e. how can a professed minimalist have so much STUFF)...
I've been focusing my efforts on...

* fortifying our development workflow
* getting developers onboard with the iPhone, beyond the hype and into the corporate sphere
* considering research opportunities
* playing with the latest crop of clever open source e-Learning portals
* contorting Subversion/Apache/DAV into an even more awesome version control platform than it already is
* rolling out a corporate chat server
* ...and finally getting to the intranet portal.

Clean integration with existing infrastructure and workflow is the name of the game as disjointed-yet-cool technology never, ever gets adopted! I could go on and on but that's a decent slice of what's kept me busy.

There is a lot more, too, but I'll be focusing on the above topics in individual posts outlining my recent work in some future posts. The best part is we are on the verge of Spring in Minnesota, who could ask for a better season in a more beautiful part of the country!

What is it all about?

Do your internal meetings feel like this sometimes?
<

Now, call me behind the times. I just stumbled upon http://adlcommunity.net/ which is undeniably significant evidence of the Moodle LMS's entry into the mainstream. This is great news for those of us striving for a new era beyond the stranglehold the corporate LMS vendors have maintained for years. Anyone familiar with industry-specific software will understand the need for competition in these venues. Let's welcome the gentrification of the corporate LMS!

ADL is the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative of the federal government.

If you haven't heard, Mahara in an up and coming open platform for electronic portfolio and social networking. Sure, there are tons of social networking "web 2.0" doo-dads out there but this one is angled toward the e-Learning industry and grew out of the same general community as the excellent [and also free] Moodle LMS. There are even plans to integrate the two complementary packages.

I asked Penny Leach, one of the Mahara developers in New Zealand, what she envisions as potential applications for the platform:  read more »

Hey, it can work [well kind of, and in some cases]. Just make darned sure there is someone on staff who is available during your own business day.

I can't tell you how many times I have had to be up in the twilight hours just to get a course deployed on a foreign hosted LMS. As long as there is at least one person over there with some general acumen who is in available for email or IM during our business day, potential for a successful deployment is about 10 times higher.

 read more »

I'm looking for some good case studies on development groups which are using Subversion for Flash version control. Best case would be groups of 5 or more collaborating on projects.
I'm less concerned about the actionscript-only side of things.

What I'd like some commentary on especially is the process of collaborating on binary media files. Our organization is accustomed to the pessimistic locking paradigm in which only one developer is ever working on a given file. This even goes for ascii files as clearly more and more code is being externalized. Developers who are used to working this way are afraid to switch to a copy-modify-merge paradigm for obvious reasons and our organization is no exception. Many e-Learning developers come more so from the designer slant so programmer's tools like version control tend to be less familiar.  read more »

Yes, that's right, this fledgling site has not quite gotten off to a good start. Surely I've got enough caffiene at my disposal to write plenty of observations here over and above the typical work and family stuff! As much as I'd love to elevate the likelyhood of getting some serious traffic here, my own self-deprecating nature causes me to ignore clear opportunities every day to update the site with my newest ramblings. I'll be talking soon about upcoming technologies in e-Learning, some great conferences, and my usual ranting about archaic LMS architectures and the challenges of working in massive corporate.

Anyway, I've been doing a lot of research lately as I have been assembling the 2008 development plan for my employer. While much of the e-Learning industry tends to lag technologically, I'm trying to avoid that going forward. It is an exciting prospect to look for points where we as a vendor might expand our field of view to encompass the latest goings-on in interactive media development.  read more »

Check out this really neat AIR application, Searchcoders / Dashboard.

This is the kind of thing that is the future of e-Learning. Desktop located resource available persistenly. Imagine this in a call-center culture, deployed globally. Likewise, consider the potential for highbrow-types; executive leadership action learning or something. This programmer's reference application is just the beginning. In the very near future we'll see flex-developed applications providing real-time maps/travel planning, maybe some fun geocaching games, numerous online university applications [think tutor or real-time class collaboration or competition], organic peer-based music lessons, and a ton of other stuff I won't think of now because it's 2AM!