pipwerks

I looked up the QTI specs on the IMS site and couldn’t believe the boldfaced notice I saw on the page: “HTML documents may be viewed online, but may not be printed without permission” (emphasis added).

Can you believe that? IMS is in the business of creating standards they want the whole world to use. These standards should be open, easily accessible and free from licensing constraints. Why on earth do they want to put silly notices like this on their site?

Two small but important edits.

I just converted my AS2 SCORM class to AS3.

Read documentation and download file(s) here.

I just saw something interesting I thought I’d pass along. In the new HTML 5 proposal, the strong element is being modified to represent “importance rather than strong emphasis.”
The WHATWG gives the following example:
<p><strong>Warning.</strong> This dungeon is dangerous.
<strong>Avoid the ducks.</strong> Take any gold you find.
<strong><strong>Do not take any of the diamonds</strong>,
they are explosive and [...]

I just finished an ActionScript 2.0 class file meant to be a companion to my JavaScript SCORM API wrapper. It includes a bunch of type checking, type conversion, and error-checking, and works with both SCORM 1.2 and 2004.

Found a small bug when using the wrapper with Flash (AS2): functions that return string values (such as SCORM.data.get()) were coming out ‘undefined’. (grr)

Explicitly typing the return value as a string seems to make Flash happy.

Some small edits to the wrapper:

Fixed a few typos in debug statements
Added extra error-checking during SCORM.connection.initialize; if connection cannot be made AND no error code is given, display notice that server has not responded.

Related links:

Original SCORM API Wrapper journal entry
pipwerks.com SCORM page

Buckle your seatbelts, you may not like this statement: Most eLearning tools do not promote the creation of effective courses, do not promote web standards, and do not promote accessibility; they merely make cookie-cutter course development easier for technically inexperienced course developers.

There, I’ve said it. Please don’t hate me.

I’ve been a longtime user of the ADL wrapper (with code from the late Claude Ostyn), and to be honest, it’s pretty much met my needs. But I was never completely comfortable with the wrapper for two reasons: 1) The code is hard to read with confusing and overly complicated looking variable names, and 2) the code made heavy use of global variables, which in this Web 2.0 world is a big no-no. This past week I decided to roll up my sleeves and make a new SCORM API wrapper that takes care of these issues.

Update April 7, 2008: I’ve written a new AS3 class named LegacyCaptivateLoader that uses ExternalInterface to bridge the AS3 SWF and the Captivate SWF. Check it out.
I guess I’m late to the party, but I only recently realized that although a Flash Player 9 SWF can load an older Flash Player 6/7/8 SWF, it [...]