No updates, and how to ruin a Flash designer's day

Coming at you like this vintage streetcar

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.

Here's what I'm looking at. We'll finally move completely to a modern version control system in Subversion. Further, I'll offend some designers by moving coding out of the Flash IDE and into an external IDE [Eclipse or Flashdevelop would be two suitable options]. One developer I know of will be elated to hear this but just about the entire rest of them are going to run in fear, it seems. So much it has been a debate between whether or not modern programming techniques fit into our creative and abstract environment, but I am going to argue that the argument is moot, or, something like that. My point will be that it has become obvious that building interactive media is every bit as complex and involved as any other software application development process. The reasoning behind the use of patterns and standards in object-oriented programming become obvious in practice. To me, having come out of BeOS applications development and considering my affinity for the new, new thing, it was obvious years ago. I think it is just a matter of discomfort to push software development practice on interactive designers in general. Adobe knows this, as it has accentuated how its latest Flash IDE is "easier to use". It didn't have to be easier.

Traditionally, Authorware had been the development tool of choice for e-Learning applications for its visual ease of use and dedicated purpose. This remained true for many years. Today, even a brief look at all of the 'rapid' tools foisted upon developers shows there is still demand for this type of easy tool. However, the industry is moving toward more and more sophisticated degrees of interactivity, and it is going to go way beyond tossing a single monolithic courseware at a user. Tomorrow's e-Learning applications are going to need to captivate the user not only by presenting nice interactivity, but by giving contextual relevance. Specifically, relevance to the topic and how it applies to that user personally. This will require far more sophisticated architecture at least at some level in the development, and e-Learning development teams are going to need at least one very savvy lead developer who understands this. What the tool of choice will be is irrelevant [whether it is JavaFX, Flash, or Silverlight, or tomorrow's new thing]. The bottom line is the level of sophistication is going to be on par with applications development itself.

It will also be increasingly important to continue to pay attention to AIR and Flex advancements. Tomorrow's e-Learning isn't going to need a browser in order to be network aware. Much like there is a convergence of television and the web, there will be a pervasive emergence of 'lifestyle' e-Learning which will better suit the differing needs of learners. That means applications which are capable of delivering the same level of richness and instructional value regardless of their deployment to mobile devices, thin kiosks, or whatever new immersive media platform presents itself.

Contextually relevant media is all the rage today. You walk into the bank and right there you have flat panel televisions giving you weather, stocks, news, and whatever else. Hospitals display currently on-call practitioners, and universities display classroom status and upcoming classes outsite each door. These are just the beginning for this emerging media industry. This same level of contextual relevance needs to be applied to today's monolithic LMS-and-courseware architecture. e-Learning might lag interactive media now, but I want to close that gap.