Speaking at DevLearn and Adobe Learning Summit

I’ve been busy recently, so you have had to suffer another one of my blogging dearths. Fear not dear reader, I’m still here, hale and hearty and in one complete piece.

Adobe Learning Summit

I’m speaker at this years Adobe Learning Summit, where I will be talking about the value that Adobe brings to the eLearning Suite by adding integration between the various tools. Since I am a developer, not a teacher or Instructional Designer, this topic is close to my heart. I don’t claim to be expert in many tools, but I do have to dip my feet into many and various tools in order to do my work. The integration on the eLearning Suite can improve my workflow significantly.

DevLearn

In the last couple of years I have travelled to San Jose for the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn conference. With each visit, I learn more, I network more, and I become more impressed by the professionalism and organisational brilliance of the eLearning Guild team. This is a great conference, with its heart firmly set in eLearning, and a solid bias towards the more technical aspects of eLearning (tools and technology) rather than the teaching aspect. That’s not to say that there’s nothing there for Instructional Designers, teachers and managers, just that DevLearn is a great conference for people like me who are tasked with making the technology do what the educators need.

I will be speaking at Devlearn

This year, I am also speaking at DevLearn, where I will talk about some of my favourite features in the Adobe  eLearning Suite. This is a similar session to the one I presented at the Annual Gathering earlier this year, though it will be updated to reflect my more recent experiences.

Captivate 4: Fix for small text in Short Answer question

Recently, a couple of different people asked me about Short Answer questions in Captivate 4. Apparently, when you create and publish a Short Answer question, the text entry box that your learner types into has small, 8-point text by default. That’s fine, you might think, but there is no way to edit the properties of this text entry box, so you are stuck with 8 point text.

Short Answer questions in Captivate 4 have tiny text in the answer box

I contacted ‘RJ’ Jacquez via Twitter and asked him about it. RJ is the Adobe Evangelist for eLearning and Technical Communication, which means he is a great go-to guy for all things to do with the eLearning Suite and the Technical Communication Suite from Adobe.

Quick as a flash, RJ confirmed that it was indeed true, there is no way to format the answer text in a Short Answer question in Captivate 4.

Now, here is where things get interesting. Most of the time, when an issue like this is raised, it must be reported as a bug and a fix may not appear until the next release of a product. But the Adobe Captivate engineers are special bunch – they rustled up a fix for this issue that requires no formal patch to Captivate 4.

Those of you who are familiar with Captivate 4 will know that a new feature called Widgets. Widgets can be devised that extend Captivate’s features and functionality way beyond the original intent of the Captivate engineers. Those same engineers have realised that they can also fix some issues with the product by using Widgets.

This Short Answer Input Text Formatting widget is a simple and quick fix

… and so they made a widget that can be used to customise the font settings for the Short Answer question. This Widget is a 50k download, so it’s quick and easy to get and ind install. The only caveat, so far as I can see, is that the Captivate file must be published as ActionScript 3.0. The fix will not work if you publish your file as AS 2.0 compatible.

Here's the same question with the answer text reformatted

So where can you get this fix? RJ has a simple demonstration o fthe problem, which you can view here https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p84127193/. At the end of the demo, there is a link to the download of the Widget file, and instructions on where to install it.

You should follow RJ on Twitter if you want to get the best and latest eLearning and Technical Communication Suite tips and info @rjacquez

Thanks RJ and the Captivate team!

Captivate 4: How to capture, store and display your user’s name

The new custom variables in Adobe Captivate 4 make it fairly easy to capture, store and display your users name. Once stored you can also add the name to the Certificate widget and use it in many other ways. It is not immediately obvious just how you might achieve this, so I put together a quick demo that should show you all you need to know.

Click this image to view the full demo.

Dreamweaver Coursebuilder extension in Captivate 4

I’ve seen a number of people asking about the Coursebuilder extensions that are installed to Dreamweaver CS4 in the Adobe eLearning Suite. Specifically, people have been trying to find out what is different between this version of Coursebuilder, and the version that was available a few years ago.

So I asked the Adobe engineers who have worked on this, and this is the response I got:-

The Course Builder in eLS has loads of new features, following is the list of new features added

3 new Interaction types

• Matching – Drag and drop, Combo box type.
• Sequence Interaction
• Likert Interaction

SCORM 1.2 and 2004 Compatibility
All the interactions support SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 along with AICC. The selection can be made in the tracking tab. Based on the setting in the tracking tab, Actions in the action manager can be selected for tracking the score.

Compatibility with Different Browsers
The New Course Builder supports the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer.

New look and feel
The Interactions carry new icons and the Course Builder Wizard does not carry the legacy scroll bar.

So there you have it, from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

I’m Presenting at the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering

It’s time for some information sharing. I’ll be at the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering this week.

On Wednesday I’m doing a session on Adobe’s eLearning Suite. My session number is 408 and the title is “Adobe e-Learning Suite – A Whistle-stop Tour of Favorite Features“. According to the online schedule, you will find me in the Camellia room.

On the same day I’m making an early start (7:15!), as I am facilitating one of the Breakfast Bytes Discussion Groups. My topic is “Mobile Learning, How Will New Technologies Affect Your Thinking?” and you’ll find me in the Narcissus room. Hmm. Should I be reading something into the room name? 

Finally, on Friday morning I’ll be moderating one of the Espresso Learning Activities tables. The table discussion is “Bridging the Gap Between Page Turning and Learning Engagement“.  The subtext of the title is:

• We walk before we can run – we page turn before we engage.
• What does learner engagement mean to you?
• Creating learner engagement doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming.

Come and chat with me on table 15.

I’m looking forward to learning from everyone else at the conference. The eLearning Guild always put on a great show, and they attract some of the best eLearning experts in the World, so I am honoured to be able to rub shoulders with them and be able to learn from them all.

If you see me  at the conference, come and say hi.

“as education professionals, we are always behind the curve”

“as education professionals, we are always behind the curve”

Matthew Nehrling wrote this in his blog post Who are the post-millennials?, where he raises the question of how are teachers going to deal with children born after the mid 90s who are even more soaked in technology than the so called ‘millenials’. More to the point, he also asks how are teachers going to cope with the children of millenials.

All this talk of millennials, digital natives etc. has had me thinking recently. Educators, as Matthew stated, *are* behind the curve. They are typically trained by an older generation, whose comfort zone in learning came from an even older generation. This probably didn’t matter much when technology played little part in day-to-day life, and when the Internet had no influence on learning and access to knowledge,  because the tools of the trade – books, pens, pencils – were largely unchanged in decades (centuries?), and teaching from books was equally (in?)effective for everybody.

There are certainly many teachers out there who ‘get’ technology and who are able to harness it to enhance the learning experience for their students of all ages. However my experience as a mature student and as ‘technology advisor’ to several teachers has been that most teachers, especially those teaching children, have little, if any, grasp of technology. They themselves are not even ‘with it’ enough to qualify as “digital immigrants”.

Over the next few years, millennials will become teachers, and let’s face it, regardless of the hype, children who are comfortable and skilled with technology are in the minority, if for no other reason than this is true of their parents. There most certainly are millions of computer geeks out there who have children who they are encouraging in their own geeky footsteps, but I suggest that the non-geeky, computer-shy, computer-illiterate, computer-indifferent parents are in the majority, and thus the majority of millennials are somewhat computer-ignorant too and thus at best would qualify as Digital Immigrants themselves.

And I’m pretty sure that will be true of millennials as they become teachers.

I think it will be another couple of generations before we will see technological ubiquity of the type suggested by Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants essay, by which time the geeks will have moved on to something unimagined, and the masses will just be getting to grips with Wikipedia.

OK I maybe paint a darker and less flattering picture of ‘the masses’ than people might like to see, but the truth is the masses are not, and won’t ever be, geeks. So they won’t ever be Digital Natives … at least, not while it’s still possible to be an immigrant or an alien.

Catching up with the week’s Adobe Captivate blog posts

The Adobe Captivate team has been busy blogging about the new features in Captivate 4. Following is a quick list of their most recent posts:-

• Variables: Simple Usage. “One of the new features added in Adobe Captivate 4 was Variables and Scripting. In this blog post we will try to understand some simple usages of Variables.”
• Authoring – limited by your creativity not the tool. “Captivate users – do you sometimes feel that we were cramping your style and limiting your creativity?”
• Silent Install for Captivate 4. “Just a quick note about installing Captivate 4 in silent mode (or from command line).”
• Creating large modular projects using Captivate 4. “Large eLearning projects are always difficult to maintain and the authoring process is inefficient because of lack of parallelism and collaboration.”
• _root issue in Adobe Captivate. “SWF movie created using Raptivity uses _root inside its ActionScript. In most cases, SWFs referring to _root do not work inside any container that loads the SWF.”

The Adobe Captivate team are doing a great job keeping us up to date with the latest Captivate news. Thanks guys!

Gulf Coast Adobe User Group

I’ve just been approved as manager for the Gulf Coast Adobe User Group. Watch this space for information about meetings and events.

If you are interested in coming to meetings and joining our group, go ahead and make contact on the Gulf Coast User Group web site.

If you are interested in joining an Adobe User Group in your area, do a search on groups.adobe.com to find out where your nearest group is.

Captivate 4: How to save the current location and navigate back to it later.

mattockenfels asked in feedback to the Captivate 4 Community Help:-

Can I assign rdInfoCurrentSlide to a custom variable, the use it later in a Jump to Page anywhere else in a course? I have content pages that are shared by different topics, and I need to return back to where I navigated away from.

I tried to find a way to do this, but discovered I could not find a way within Captivate 4 to assign anything to rdInfoCurrentSlide .

After some exploration, I found I could achieve what mattockenfels asked by saving rdInfoCurrentFrame instead, and assigning the saved value to rdcmndGoToFrameandResume .

I made a quick demo file that you can view here. You can also download the source file from my website.

I am always happy to be shown a better way, so please post your suggestions in the comments for this post.

Adobe has posted a demo of Text to Speech in Captivate 4

If you’ve been following the flurry of blog posts and news recently, you’ll know that Adobe Captivate 4 was released last week. One of the great new features is a text to speech engine that lets you generate speech from your closed caption text.

Adobe Captivate 4 Text to Speech demo

Adobe has published a demo showing how to use this new feature on the Adobe Captivate Blog.

I tested out this feature on my cell phone (a Samsung BlackJack II) by creating a small Captivate 4 demo and publishing it to my phone using the new Flash Lite Distributable Player. It worked. First time!

I wouldn’t recommend using Text to Speech this way as a habit, at least not for mobile devices, because what it does is embed an actual audio file, rather than converting the text on the fly. The sound and speech quality are both pretty good, and it sounds a lot less ‘roboty’ than your typical text to speech engine, but you may not find the relatively large file size acceptable. From my brief tests, it appears that since the audio starts off very clean (no background noise, plosives, sibilants, hiss or rumble) you can compress the audio files a little bit more aggressively than might be possible when compared to the audio recorded with a headset mike in a corner of the office.

So, if you need to add speech to your content, and you cannot afford the time and expense of recording quality audio from a skilled voiceover artist, then this new Text to Speech feature in Adobe Captivate 4 might be just what you need.