Vietnam Assistive Technology: January 2009

Friday, January 30, 2009

Social Brain

I've been looking for a term that defines - Crowdsourcing in the Small

What do you think about calling the network it's the

Social Brain

and then we can talk about

Social Brain Building
Social Brain Access

I'm liking this. Thoughts?

Adobe eLearning Suite- A Very Special Webinar

Yesterday I had the good fortune to be able to do participate in a one-to-one webinar on the new Adobe elearning Suite with RJ Jacquez, Senior Product Evangelist for the Adobe eLearning Suite which was just recently released. I would like to thank Jody from A & R Edleman for making this possible and for keeping me abreast of all the exciting developments that are taking place at Adobe in the eLearning space. RJ was kind enough to highlight the key features in the Adobe eLearning Suite and show me how the individual software applications in the package add value to the suite. The Adobe eLearning Suite consists of the following applications that work together to enrich the users eLearning experience: Captivate 4, Adobe Flash CS4, Adobe DreamWeaver CS4, Adobe Photoshop CS4, Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Adobe Presenter 7, Adobe Soundbooth CS4, as well as Adobe Bridge CS4, Adobe Device Central CS4, and a SCORM Packager.

Having been an avid Captivate 3 user I was glad to see some of the new features which have been added to Captivate 4 that will allow me more control and easier ways to personalize the eLearning experience. Captivate 4 now includes the ability to store variables which will allow the developer to personalize the experience in your courses. One of the really nice features which I was able to see yesterday was the ability for automatic panning which lets you capture an area of the screen which may be outside the original preset. All of us who use Captivate will be glad to find out that we can output the video as one SWF file regardless if your video has captured full motion recording. And last but not least Captivate 4 has the ability to send your video out and allow others to comment without the other party having to own Captivate. Using an Adobe AIR application individuals can comment on the video without the need to own a copy of Captivate. What I was most impressed by during the webinar was how the various software applications were integrated into the workflow and how Captivate 4 is able to communicate effortlessly with the other applications in the suite. In the next couple of weeks look for more posts on the Adobe eLearning Suite.

Twitter Conference Ideas

Twitter has become a pretty great tool to help with socializing at conferences. Here are a few of the things we've been doing

Twitter as Social Chat

At both DevLearn and TechKnowledge, we created a hashtag and created a specific Twitter account that was the hub. Using TweetLater and GroupTweet anyone who sent a direct message to the hub account then broadcast to everyone following that account. We also encouraged everyone to put in the hashtag. Through twitter search you can see the various conversations going on. DevLearn was more successful because of the free Wifi. You can find various relevant posts via Twitter at DevLearn.

The overall effect is a nice backchannel, constant conversation with attendees.

There is also an interesting effect that people who are not attending still hear quite a bit about the conference and have some level of tangential participation. There's also a bit of risk as exemplified by - TechKnowledge09 - Another Conference that Missed the Social Opportunity. I think there's a tendency to overemphasize negative comments coming through the twitter stream. Take a look at the Twitter Search for TK09 for a more balanced view.

TweetLater as Planning Tool

For every presentation, I spend a few minutes making sure I have a sense of my timing. What do I need to cover by what point. For my keynote at TechKnowledge, I did something a little different to plan out my presentation - and provide value to the audience (or at least part of the audience).

I went into TweetLater and set up a series of tweets that represented each point in time and I included a link to roughly the relevant content from my blog or other sources. It was nice to see it laid out as follows in TweetLater (the picture below represents after they had all been published).

I found that I tweaked the times a bit and it would be nice if TweetLater had an easier way to do this. But, it was cool to have this engage with anyone on twitter during the presentation. I had lots of positive feedback in the halls after. A few good tweets about it during the session such as:

writetechnology: I like that @tonykarrer scheduled tweets (I assume) to appear during his keynote at #tk09. Great use of the Twitter stream!

mik3yv: @writetechnology it kind of tripped me out that I was reading tweets of the concepts and principles right after he talked about them #tk09

When I was sitting down with Brent Schlenker, he suggested that we should all be using Tweet Later to plan out our conference schedule and set up TweetLater to send messages to ourselves and to others about what we were planning to do. It would be really awesome if you could forward your calendar reminders over to twitter at the press of a key. But, in the short run, it might make sense to set up a similar kind of series of activities as listed above based on the conference program.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Twitter Surveys with SocialToo

We just can't enough of Twitter these days, can we? It seems that with every passing day there is a another Twitter tool of one sort or another that comes out to keep us plugged into our social network. I just came across SocialToo which is a very simple to use survey tool which you can automatically link to your Twitter account. With SocialToo you simply create a one question survey and click on the Share with Twitter button and your question is automatically gets posted to Twitter- pretty cool. I tried it out this evening and you can participate in the survey by clicking here. So give it a try and let me know what you think. If you have some favortie Twitter tools please leave a comment. If you would like to follow me my Twitter name is assistivetek

Mindjet Connections Newsletter Available

Check out this month Mindjet Connections Newsletter for some really great articles from Jamie Nast, Michael Deutch, and Stephanie Diamond. You will also find a new video tip that I created showing you the new built in Web Browser feature which is extremely powerful. Also find out more about GyroQ which was just recently released for MindManager 8 to help you keep on track.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Be the first to check 11.50.xC4

After a long time without posting (usual lack of time) I decided to take five minutes to make an echo of some nice news. I already heard about plans for IDS 11.50.xC4 around April this year, but nonetheless I was surprised by today's IIUG's announcement.

Accordingly to this news, any customer wanting to get in touch with the next release of IDS will be able to do so, after agreeing to the usual conditions.

In the announcement we can see the major features for this new version:

Compression
Easy administration, setup & monitoring of Enterprise Replication with the Informix OpenAdmin Tool
Improved embedability
Support for the Amazon EC2 computing environment
Support for VMWare Virtualization Infrastructure and Desktop solutions

So... Compression seems obvious, Amazon EC2 seems intriguing. VMWare seems logical.
Stay alert and consult the IIUG (International Informix Users Group) site for more information.
Once again IIUG shows great collaboration spirit with IBM on promoting IDS.

You should also take a look at the next Chat with the Labs (January 29). Jerry Keesee, Director of the Informix Lab, will talk about recent Informix activities and also about the roadmap for 2009.
To register go to:

https://ww4.premconf.com/webrsvp/register?conf_id=4834295

Crowdsourcing in the Small

I've said many times that probably the biggest changes for concept workers over the past few years is the incredible access to information and more importantly the incredible access to people. In Networks and Communities, I discuss the limits of search and how Evaluating Performance of Concept Workers leads us to needing to derive Value from Social Media. And when I discuss what the new skills are around knowledge work, I quickly arrive a the biggest changes being things like finding expertise, finding answers, using social media to find answers, and learning through conversation.

The common threads here are:

People

Networks

To me, the biggest work literacy gap is in this area. The new skill is...

How do we leverage networks and other forms of social media to access the knowledge and capabilities of other people?

And I believe that the Tilde Effect is full force here. Just four days ago, someone posted a question in a LinkedIn discussion group asking for feedback on the use of particular tools. They didn't get a response in the discussion group and had not thought to do a search for people to contact directly. And this is for someone who was posting their question in LinkedIn. They were on the precipice of being able to access exactly what they needed and yet didn't have the awareness, knowledge and skills to be able to tap into that beautiful people network.

New Term Needed

So here's where I need some help. When I discuss this concept, some people say, "Oh you mean crowdsourcing." On Wikipedia, which is pretty indicative of other definitions, crowdsourcing is defined as -

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.

I have some issues with trying to apply this term to what I see happening.

"Crowd" - it implies large groups, often public, normally open
"Sourcing" - it implies that you are seeking resources for a business

Similarly, I generally don't like "Collective Intelligence" - that's the net effect, but not the individual action.

Instead, what I see happening is being done on smaller scales. It's individual concept workers reaching out to other people (known or not known), through networks or social media, to get help with their particular needs.

I've tried to come up with a good term for this. I've asked via Twitter for some help, but I still don't have something to call it. Some of the suggestions so far are:

PeopleSourcing
NetSourcing
PeerSourcing
PeopleNetKnowledge

Nothing has quite struck a chord with me. Certainly nothing as catchy as crowdsourcing.

Any suggestions?

P.S. - I'm doing X now. I'm reaching out to a network to get help. Maybe this is closer to crowdsourcing, but I think it's more X. And the fact that I've asked a few people and asked via Twitter suggests that I'm definitely doing X. What do you call it? Help!

Monday, January 26, 2009

Back to Teaching

With the new semester just beginning I have been preoccupied with getting my graduate classes set up and running. It is always exciting to start a new semester full of new ideas and ways to deliver and instruct my classes. Last week I had a chance to use PollEveryWhere in my class and it worked like a charm. My students were impressed and enjoyed the opportunity to learn a new technology that they may be able to use in their classroom. I plan on using more digital assets for my hybrid courses using tools like Camtasia Studio 6, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Acrobat 9, and Adobe Presenter which I can utilize wtih BlackBoard.

For the past couple of months I have been developing an Assistive Technology eBook with a colleague, complete with video tutorials that should be out in a couple of weeks. More to come about this eBook in a couple of days. It is an exciting project and one that shows the true potential of these various tools for educational purposes. The final product will be delivered as a downloadable PDF file taking advantage of Acrobat 9 now being able to play video's with nothing more than Acrobat Reader 9. Boy we have come a long way!

So stay tuned to this blog for more information about the Assistive Technology eBook and my reflections on using more digital assests in my courses using the aforementioned software applications.

12 eLearning Predictions for 2009

Last year I laid out in January my Ten Predictions for eLearning 2008. In my post, 2008 2009 - written in December 2008, I looked at how well I did in those predictions, and my results were pretty good, not perfect. So, let's try it again this year ...

#1 - "Self-Directed Learning" Increases

Due to economic pressures, companies are going to reduce training budgets to a point where it doesn't make sense to create content on marginal topics. Instead, we will call this "self-directed learning" and will do our best to support the workforce to learn it on their own with minimal guidance and support.

#2 - eLearning 2.0 Grows - But Creating "eLearning 2.0 Strategy" Fails

One of the better, cheap support mechanisms for self-directed learning are web 2.0 tools. As such, eLearning 2.0 will show continued growth. We will especially see a rapid growth in the use of wikis for content presentation. There will also be growth in discussions and social networks for collaborative learning.

At the same time, organizations who try to create big eLearning 2.0 Strategies will move much slower than organizations who adopt easy to use tools and make tactical use of these tools.

Corollary: if you have SharePoint installed, you will be using SharePoint a lot more this year.

#3 - Increase in Consumer/Education Social Learning Solutions will Increase Pressure for Social Learning Solutions in Corporate Learning

Sorry, I couldn't figure out a shorter way to say this. 2008 was an interesting year that saw a myriad of new start-ups offering content through interesting new avenues. Social learning solutions like social homework help provided by Cramster; CampusBug, Grockit, TutorVista, EduFire, English Cafe, and the list goes on and on.

What will happen to about 20% of the workplace learning professionals is that some VP/C level in your company will have their teenager or college age kid use one of these services and tell them about it. They will they proceed to wonder why you aren't doing something similar.

It's the change where consumer leads education leads corporate.

#4 - Quick Wins & Toolkits

With the tough economy, everyone will be looking for quick wins. How can you improve performance quickly and at low cost? The answer for many organizations will be less training and more performance support in the form of toolkits. Teach me less about communication and give me more templates for important, tough communication points.

Off-the-shelf content companies will be moving to meet this need by emphasizing quick wins through resources.

#5 - Virtual Classroom Tipping Point

Based on a few different conversations and experiences, I believe that we've reached a point where virtual classroom training is no longer seen as inherently inferior and a lower value. Some training will still be preferred face to face such as when team building or in-person soft skills are important, but 2009 will be the year when we realize that we should be justifying any in-person training. Price points for virtual classroom training will begin to be virtually the same as for the same in-person classes.

Corrollary: transition to virtual means greater demand for help on effective virtual classroom training and for people who are good at creation effective remote experiences.

#6 - Greater Domination by Leading Tool Vendors - Captivate, Articulate, Lectora, Camtasia

Captivate 4 is going to be a great tool. Articulate has a great tool set. Lectora is great at packaging. Camtasia is good at screencasting. It's going to be tough for me-too tools to push out these players in the corporate market. In some settings, free authoring tools may do better, but they probably won't get much traction in workplace training.

#7 - Niche Tools Emerge and Get Traction in Niches

So the caveat to the above statement about the big players getting bigger is that I believe we will see more and more niche tools get traction. We've seen some traction by the game show type tools such as those by LearningWare. We may also see use of Flash Quiz Tools, polls, survey tools or something like Harbinger Knowledge's Team Pod. These things can create fun interactions that easily fit into a course built with one of the above tools. They also fit into a wiki page. It's also interesting to see effort's like Articulate's Community Interactions - which is essentially the ability to add specialized interactions including new types of interactions from the developer community.

#8 - More Wiki Pages - Same Authored Minutes - Less Classroom Minutes

I pretty much already said this, but I might as well mention it again. The above trends around eLearning 2.0, self-directed learning, quick wins and toolkits all suggest that more web pages - authored via wikis - will be the name of the game in 2009. The goal of lower cost will continue the transition from classroom to courseware which will keep the total number of authored minutes about the same, even with the move of content from courses to web pages.

#9 - Knowledge Worker Skills

Topic growing rapidly, problem getting recognized, more and more people offering workshops and solutions to address this

I realized in 2007 that there's a very important Knowledge Worker Skill Gap
emerging. In 2008, I felt compelled to launch Work Literacy, and help help people and organizations upgrade skills like Leveraging Networks, Network Feedback, Finding Expertise, Using Social Media to Find Answers to Questions, Learning through Conversation and searching, scanning, etc.

2009 is going to be a big year for this issue. The fact that this is one of the general sessions at ASTD TechKnowledge is interesting way to start 2009. We are now offering a Work Literacy Skills Workshop. This is going to get more and more attention this year. Especially as employers move more towards self-directed learning.

#10 - Mobile Learning Niche Growth

Last year I said mobile learning would be well below where people were expecting. While I still think this will be a relatively small percentage of activity, this year, I expect to be a year in which mobile becomes more I believe that we will see continued increase in the percentage of people walking around with mobile web access. This will offer increased interesting opportunities such as:

Real-time Polls - We are just beginning to see tools like Poll Everywhere that allow mobile polling. That way an audience sitting at an in-person conference will have some of the capabilities that they do online. (Did I mention the move towards virtual classroom?)
Job aids / quick reference - about 30% of you are going to be asked to make sure your content is viewable on an iPhone.
Podcasts / Vidcasts targeting mobile professionals (ex. sales people)
Sales challenge scoreboard - For some mobile professionals, specific types of content such as sales challenges will be delivered through mobile solutions.

At the same time, the wild enthusiasm for mobile learning that was present in 2007 and died down a bit in 2008, will remain somewhat subdued. And we won't see much adoption as the central vehicle for learning content delivery.

#11 - Micro Virtual Conferences

The move towards acceptance of virtual classroom means that there will slowly begin to be acceptance of virtual conferences. Conferences this year will also do this because their other alternative is to be canceled from lack of people able to pay for travel. But because we are all going to be maxed out, expected to do 10% more work with 10% less people, we won't have time to go for several days. Instead, we will see the creation of things that are in between a full virtual conference and something that's a few sessions. These things will be more targeted and deeper. Many of them will be from ad hoc sources, such as George, Jay and myself.

#12 - Data Driven

With the economic situation, there will be greater demand for results and thus more interest in data-driven performance solutions.

Informal Learning Flow

I've always been a big believer in the value and power of informal learning. Over the past few years, I've written quite a few posts about informal learning.

The challenge for me has always been the The Paradox of Informal Learning (Form of Informal?) - it's defining systems for informal learning that effectively support learners. In many ways, eLearning 2.0 is one part of systematizing support for informal learning. I just saw that Josh Bersin wrote about this issue.

The person I most associate with informal learning is Jay Cross. And I'm happy to announce that he's working with me to help bring together resources via the Informal Learning Flow.

You can find his announcement here. Jay tells us ...

For the past couple of days, I’ve been consuming knowledge from a site that better fits how I learn. Called Informal Learning Flow, the site pulls together the feeds of the people I read and topics that I care about. You’ve got to see this in action to understand its power. Go to the site and click on a concept, say, informal learning. Then click on another concept, say, formal learning. You’ll call up entries that use both terms. Experiment a little; there’s more going on under the hood here than meets the eye.

I'm also looking forward to seeing if this helps make sense of what I feel is a pretty amorphous topic. To me, it's interesting to go look at the Tools for Informal Learning page and look at the best posts to see what comes up. And there are some good ones -

That's a pretty good list to start from. It was also interesting to see that Tools didn't appear in the titles. I also looked at what were the top posts and terms for the first half of January.

Hot Keywords -

Jay and I have had numerous conversations, debates, etc. over how to support organizations who believe in the power of informal learning but who need help making sense of getting there. I'm really looking forward to continue our conversation around this.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Processing Pages With Links

Great post by Ken Allan asking - What do you do with a Fan of Links? This is all about what to do when you encounter a page that links to many other possibly interesting pages. This relates to the strategies that I defined for how to process information in the posts Better Memory and Information Radar. However, this is a slightly different twist that I'm sure we all recognize:

I'm reading a page with lots of links
I know that some of the links are going to be good stuff

and either

I don't have time to go read all the pages linked, or
I don't want to lose the flow of the original post to go look at the other links.

But, if I don't visit the other pages, then they will not have made it into your virtual Google Memory (as described in Better Memory).

So, what do you do?

The suggestion by Tim on Ken's post is pretty much what I do, but I'm going to modify it slightly:

Ctrl+Click on interesting looking links. This opens it in a new tab but keeps focus on the current window (if you've set up your browser that way).
Continue to skim-dive-skim the article.
When I'm done with the page, I decide if I'm going to spend more time right now or at a later time going through this.
If I want to come back, I often will bookmark it with a particular tag that reminds me to look at it again.
If it's really important to come back, I set a reminder in my calendar - those are my task lists.
If I have more time, right then, I will continue to skim-dive-skim the pages that I've opened and process them.

The key here was to open those pages so that you've got them in your Google memory. They become full-text searchable.

One warning - as most of us are infovores / information addicts and we hold dearly to the myth of keeping up. So, don't be surprised if you quickly accumulate a fairly large list of "read later" tagged items. You will find that you need to really be careful about what you put on that list or you will never read it.

Other Posts in the Series

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Hot Last Week

Using the same approach as Hot List, I've compiled ...

Hot Last Week (1/9/2009 - 1/16/2009)

Hot Last Week Posts

Hot Last Week Items

Hot Last Week Keywords

Notes on the weekly hot last week.

The posts come from the primary sources for this group. Other items come from other sources.
Keywords are based on occurrences this week in addition to other social signals.

Twitter as Personal Learning and Work Tool

For people new to the concepts of social media and reviewing their tool set, is Twitter a good choice as a tool?

Introduction to Twitter for Learning

Here are some good initial starting points that discuss Twitter for Learning -

Twitter is Not for People New to Social Learning

Considering what I saw when I looked at following Twitter Learning Professionals - quickly I decided Twitter Mass Follow - Never Mind. My concern about twitter is that it will be too random for most people, especially those who have not established any relationships / understanding of the people they are following. Thus, my opinion is: Twitter is not a tool for people who are new to social media and the use of social media for personal learning and work.

There is one exception to this. If you are going to a conference or evening event where attendees will be using Twitter in a group fashion, then that's likely a good opportunity to try out the tool.

Twitter is Okay, But Not Primary

For a person who is already more into social media and what their experience might be take a quick look at Brett Miller's recent post 10 days of Twitter. I think his explanation of his experience coming onto twitter is pretty realistic, but he's also not new to social media.

There are certainly powerful examples in Twitter Collaboration Stories and Twitter for Learning.

Still, I would put Twitter as a social tool, a serendipity learning tool, a quick hit, general question tool. But it's still down on my list and you have to be careful not to allow it to waste time.
Other Posts in the Series

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Adobe eLearning Suite

FYI: Today Adobe, Inc. released a number of products that I thought you would interested in learning about. As I learn more about the new offerings I will share the information with you.

Today, Adobe Systems Inc. today announced the Adobe eLearning Suite, a new content-authoring solution for learning professionals, educators and trainers. Users can create rich learning experiences that are deliverable via the Web, desktop, mobile devices and learning management systems using this integrated set of tools, which includes:

· The just-released Adobe Captivate 4

· Adobe Flash CS4

· Adobe Dreamweaver CS4

· Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended

· Adobe Acrobat Pro

· Adobe Presenter 7

· Adobe Soundbooth CS4

· Adobe Bridge CS4

· Adobe Device Central CS4

The full press release is below. Please let me know if you'd like additional information, including box shots and screenshots, or to schedule time with an Adobe spokesperson.

Best,

Gina Pucci for Adobe Systems Inc.

650-762-2897

____________________________________

Adobe Introduces New eLearning Suite And Captivate 4 -- Learning Professionals Gain Unmatched Productivity Through Courseware Authoring Tools

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jan. 20, 2009 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Adobe eLearning Suite software, a new content-authoring solution for learning professionals, educators and trainers to create rich learning experiences that can be delivered via the Web, desktop, mobile devices and learning management systems. The new suite boosts productivity by tightly integrating a major new version of Adobe Captivate®, Adobe Flash® CS4, Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4, Adobe Photoshop® CS4 Extended, Adobe Acrobat® Pro, Adobe Presenter 7, Adobe Soundbooth® CS4, Adobe Bridge CS4, Adobe Device Central CS4 as well as eLearning extensions for Adobe Flash® CS4 and Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4.

“The new Adobe eLearning Suite is a unique and highly integrated set of tools designed to help professionals author, enrich, review and publish rich eLearning content all within one environment,” said Naresh Gupta, senior vice president of the Print and Publishing Business Unit at Adobe. “By leveraging different applications and streamlined workflows, learning professionals can be truly innovative and reach learners in new ways anytime, anywhere and through any medium.”

Adobe Captivate 4

Adobe Captivate 4, a new point product release and also the cornerstone of the suite, is the latest version of Adobe’s eLearning software for creating professional eLearning content and courseware that combines simulations, scenario-based training, quizzing, rich media and interactivity. Professionals can take advantage of more than two dozen new features including single SWF file publishing, text-to-speech conversion, a drawing toolbar for simple graphics, enhanced project templates, and round-trip Microsoft® PowerPoint® workflows, which let users import and edit PowerPoint slides with audio and interactivity. Adobe Captivate 4 also preserves Photoshop layers, which can then be animated individually, and supports PDF publishing and Audio Video Interleave (AVI) output for publishing to YouTube™.

With Adobe Captivate Reviewer, a new Adobe® AIR™ application, learning professionals can capture reviewers’ feedback regardless of their operating system and insert comments directly into an Adobe Captivate SWF file, simplifying the review process. Adobe Captivate 4 also enables users to add customizable tables of contents that automatically update as a learner navigates a project. To further boost engagement, learning professionals can use system and custom variables to provide learners with a personalized learning experience. For example, a learner can be prompted to type their name into a blank field in the beginning of the course and Adobe Captivate 4 will automatically personalize upcoming slides with the learner’s name.

Workflow and Integration Benefits

By integrating Adobe’s industry leading content creation tools, the Adobe eLearning Suite presents learning professionals with workflow benefits that are unavailable when purchasing individual products. With the Dreamweaver CS4 CourseBuilder extension, course designers can use Dreamweaver CS4 to directly create HTML-based eLearning modules, complete with assessments, by utilizing standard question types. Using the new Shared Courseware Object Reference (SCORM) packager, designers can also combine Adobe Captivate 4, Flash CS4, Dreamweaver CS4 and Adobe Presenter content into a single course, which further simplifies course creation.

With the inclusion of Soundbooth CS4, learning professionals can easily remove noise from recordings, polish voice-overs, customize music to fit a production and mix multiple clips on several tracks. Course designers can further engage their audiences with powerful visuals created within Photoshop CS4 Extended, which includes added features for editing 3D images and motion-based content. The visuals along with media developed in Adobe Captivate or other components can be easily organized, browsed, viewed and directly placed into Adobe Captivate 4, Photoshop CS4 and Flash CS4 from one central location using Adobe Bridge CS4.

Once content is ready for delivery, users can select one of several standardized output formats, including SWF, HTML, PDF, AVI, and SCORM, enabling easy delivery to the Web, desktop and learning management systems. If course designers don’t have access to a learning management system, the Adobe eLearning Suite allows users to publish directly to Adobe Acrobat® Connect Pro™ (sold separately). Additionally, Adobe Device Central CS4 allows course designers to design, preview, and test content for viewing on more than 600 mobile device screens.

Pricing and Availability

Adobe eLearning Suite and Adobe Captivate 4 are immediately available through Adobe Authorized Resellers and the Adobe Store. Estimated street price for the suite is US$1799 and US$799 for Adobe Captivate 4 as a standalone product. Upgrade and education pricing for both products is available. Both the Adobe eLearning Suite and Adobe Captivate 4 are compatible with Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended) and Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1. For more information about the Adobe eLearning Suite visit www.adobe.com/products/elearningsuite, for Adobe Captivate 4 visit www.adobe.com/products/captivate .

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information – anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Screencast Showing eLearning Learning

Michael Hanley was nice enough to post a description and screencast of how to navigate the eLearning Learning Community and what he sees as the value proposition. It's very cool to have people like Michael involved who can add value to the collective whole. Thanks Michael.

Remote Collaboration

My primary interest here are the methods and tools that allow us to work better as part of remote work teams. In other words -

How do we collaborate together in remote work teams to be as effective or even more effective than a team that works down the hall?

Let me admit that I'm likely in over my head when talking about methods and tools for collaboration. I cannot claim to be an expert, and I feel like this topic demands a lot of soft skills such as communication skills, team skills, handling cultural and work style issues, etc. as well as knowing about tools and methods.

My focus in this post is mostly on the Tool Set and a little bit about methods - as is the focus of this series. So, this post is only a small portion of the answer.

I'm particularly drawing on both personal experience and on experience with the work skills workshops we are offering. At the start of these workshops, we put people into remote work teams. At the core, when I look at what a team needs, it's a pretty simple list:

Real-time

Voice
Screen Sharing
Document Editing (sometimes)

Asynchronous

Share / collaborate on documents, web pages
Discussion
Notification

Of course, I'm simplifying by leaving out things like video chat, recording, etc.

Real-time Voice

I have had great success with a number of tools. So while I'm listing the following because they are good initial choices, there are a lot of Collaboration Tools out there.

Skype - Fantastic voice tool for 1-to-1 as well as conference calls up to 25 people. See: Quick Start Guide for New Skype Users.

Freeconference.com - For times when someone cannot be online, this service works great to establish a quick conference line.

Real-time Screen Sharing

Again, same caveat - lots of great tools that provide screen sharing. A few starting points:

Adobe Connect Now - free online meetings for up to three people.

DimDim - Still a little rough around the edges, but a great, free tool.

Real-time Document Editing

I've had two experiences recently that have really struck me around real-time document editing.

One was having a small (7 person) project team get together on a conference call and have all of us editing the status report real-time via Google Spreadsheets. You could see where people are working. People moved ahead of the conversation and updated status notes so we could skip them. We found we would discuss what needed to be discussed, agree on the next step and see it appear real-time. You leave the meeting with an agreed to status report, action steps, etc. It's truly a thing of beauty.

The other experience I mentioned in Real-Time Collaborative Editing, Robin Good used MindMeister to allow participants to collectively edit a Mind Map during a session at the Learning Trends. It resulted in a great learning experience and a quite good resource.

Asynchronous Content Sharing / Editing

In terms of using these products with remote work teams, Google Spreadsheets seems to have hit the most important items for me. In addition to the real-time editing described above, it also has notifications of changes to people who are collaborating on the document. For some (inexplicable) reason, Google Docs does not.

I also heavily use Wikis, especially when the desired result is a set of web pages. I recommend pbWiki as an easy to use Wiki solution. If you are not familiar with Wikis - here's a quick introduction -

Here are additional resources for people new to Wikis collected as part of the Work Literacy course:

5 Uses for a Wiki at Work

Wikis as Personal Space

Examples of Educational Wikis
Horizon Project--Vicki Davis's "Flat Classroom Project"--outstanding example of how to use a wiki for learning.
Wiki Wake-up Call and Use Cases
WikiPatterns--A great collection of patterns and "anti-patterns" that spur (or impede) wiki adoption

Because I use Delicious as part of my better memory, I like it when work teams use it to share web pages that are relevant to the team. To do that, you must first agree on a tag to use to indicate it's part of the work teams' effort. You should already be doing that individually, this only requires an added step of getting agreement with the group.

The next level of my better memory was taking notes. I mentioned that I either do that through working documents or through a blog. Those exact mechanisms should be extended out to the work team. Blogs are an excellent way to allow the work team to see stream of thought of team members.

Other tools that fit into sharing content:

Google Calendar - great calendar tool especially when collaborating on calendars.
Xdrive: Online storage to share files.
YouSendIt: Clean way to send large files.
Flickr: Share and find photos.

Asynchronous Discussion

I personally have found that Ning works great as a tool for all sorts of different needs. Creating a new Ning network is very easy and it gives you a lot of what you would want / need as a work team. Here are a couple of quick guides to getting started on Ning:

How to Create Your Own Social Network with Ning

Start Your Own Social Network in Minutes with Ning

Of course, if you've not yet joined some of the existing Learning Communities on Ning, then go do that right now so you are used to how it works.

Work Team Notification

Notification of team members of what's going on with the team is incredibly important. I already mentioned that the fact that Google Docs does not support notification makes it more difficult to use as a solution.

The bottom line on most work teams is that you want to have a reliable notification of changes, discussion, etc. done by the team; to the appropriate channel; with the appropriate frequency. There are two primary notification channels that most work teams wants:

Email - periodic or real-time notification of changes.
RSS - feed changes into an RSS reader that will be checked as needed

As members of the work team, we should be able to control what goes where and with what frequency.

Teamwork Tips and Skills

If you want a lot more on this, you can go to: http://delicious.com/tag/virtualteams

Other Collaboration Tools

There are a lot of tools that can be considered Collaboration Tools.

Other Posts in the Series

Monday, January 19, 2009

Olympic Utilities for MindManager 7 & 8

Over the past couple of months I have had the opportunity to touch base with some of the developers of MindManager add-ins to see what they had up their sleeves for 2009. I was delighted to find out when speaking with Nigel from Olympic Limited that his company would shortly release a MindManager 7 & 8 add-in called Olympic Utilities. The Olympic Utilities tools once installed can be viewed as a new Ribbon Tab within MindManager giving you access to the various tools. Nigel was kind enough to provide with a license so that I could test it out. Olympic Utilities was very easy to install and I was up and running in no time. Once installed you will find that you have a new ribbon with ten new utilities that you can use within MindManager. The ten utilities include the following:

Link2Attachment

A handy utility that will convert a hyper linked document such as a PDF file or a Word document and change it to an Attachment (embedded within the map). The add-in also allows you to either keep the current hyperlink or have it replaced which allows for additional flexibility.

Topic Text Lock/Un-Lock

This utility allows you to select a Topic and then lock the text so it cannot be changed by other users of the map, (unless they have Olympic Utilities installed). When a Topic is locked, it is indicated by a padlock icon on the Topic.

Topic+Topic

Allows you to add selected Topics, (providing they have a numerical text title), and have the sum either displayed on screen or added to the map.

Topic2CallOut/CallOut2Topic

Change Topics to Call-Out Topics or back again with a single click.

Topic2Date

Takes the selected Topic and inserts a user selected date. The user can select to have the day of the week added to the Topic if desired.

Map2Left

This function allows you to open a map which has its Topic alignment set to Left so that all new Topics created are added to the left hand side of the map.

Topic2Notes

Takes the selected Topic and steps through the sub-topics and converts them into Text Notes of the selected Topic.

Topic2Resource

Takes the selected Topic and its first Sub-Topics and creates a new Map Marker Group and adds the Sub-Topics as Resources.

Topic Calculator

Use this on a numerical Topic to display different conversion such as Miles/Kilometers, Inches/Feet etc. Also allows basic math calculations to be carried out on the selected Topic and the result added to the map.

Topic2Vertical

Takes the selected Topic and makes the Topic orientation vertical. This allows the user to select the character spacing of the resulting Topic as well.

As noted I found Olympic Utilities easy to use and found some of the commands quite intriguing. I really enjoyed being able to quickly insert the date into a topic using Date2Topic and the TopicCalculator was outstanding and very well implemented. The ability to quickly change the text in a topic from horizontal to vertical orientation using the Topic2Vertical could come in handy as was the ability to lock the text in a topic with TopicTextLock. The Link2Attachment is one of my favorites and one that I will use often. With Link2Attachment you are quickly able to turn your links into attachments thereby embedding the document in the map. The more you use Olympic Utilities the more it grows on you. I was wondering what your favorite Olympic Utilities feature is? If you enter at the right top of the blog page your name and email you will be in the running for a FREE copy of Olympic Utilities- but you have to be in it to win! You can also purchase a copy of Olympic Utilities in the in the AssistiveTek Prostore. So check it out!