DevLearn 2007

4 Comments / November 7, 2007 / e-learning

Today was the day… I gave a presentation at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn 2007 conference in San Jose. Topic? Captivate-to-Flash ActionScript Communication. Not a sexy title, I know, but there was a pretty respectable turnout… which indicates to me that a lot of people want to use Captivate but are feeling quite frustrated with its limitations. I had a few technical glitches with the laptop and projector (Murphy’s Law, I suppose), but otherwise all seemed to go well. The audience was very receptive and had some great questions. I even managed to give a little plug for SWFObject. While working …

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Assistive computer technology and web accessibility

October 26, 2007 / e-learning, General

Just thought I’d pass this link on: http://www.assistiveware.com/videos.php (short write-up here — thanks to Roger Johansson for the link.)

These are video profiles of people with disabilities — mild to severe — who use assistive computer technology to improve their lives. Some people use the computers to simply help them with their jobs (such as a blind person who is a professional French-to-English translator), while others use their computers as a lifeline to the rest of the world.
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Armed with a basic understanding of accessibility, and with a little planning, a web developer can create courses and/or websites that contain rich content — even Flash movies and videos — while supporting a majority of assistive computer/alternative web browsing technologies.

Actionscript, JavaScript, and SCORM

3 Comments / August 10, 2007 / e-learning, JavaScript, SCORM

For the last week, I’ve been doggedly attempting to create a hybrid of Flash-to-JavaScript communication techniques for creating cross-browser SCORM-conformant courses that work with almost any version of Flash Player. Today I threw in the towel. Here’s my story.

Making Actionscript calls from Adobe Captivate

10 Comments / May 2, 2007 / e-learning, JavaScript

Captivate 2.0 doesn’t include the ability directly manipulate Actionscript. This has been problematic for people like myself who have Flash-based ‘players’ that load and unload both Captivate SWFs and Flash SWFs; we often need the Captivate SWF to perform some kind of action when it reaches its end.

I hate to say it…

February 15, 2006 / e-learning, General, web design and development

But I found another Microsoft product helpful today. It pains me to say it, but it’s true. I have created an XML template for an online course delivery system I’m building at my workplace. The course data for each course needs to be placed into a copy of this XML template. The problem is that I don’t want to work directly in XML all day, and my coworkers can’t be expected to write course content directly in XML format. I needed to devise an easy-to-use method for inputting data to an XML document (filling in the blanks). My initial research …

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Daily newness: An online XML-to-XSD Converter

February 13, 2006 / e-learning, General, web design and development

OK, most of you probably don’t know the difference between an XML file and an XSD (“XML Schema”) file. For a brief intro check out W3Schools’ XML Schema tutorial. A brief quote: “The purpose of an XML Schema is to define the legal building blocks of an XML document, just like a DTD.” This week I needed to create an XML Schema doc for work. The XSD file would be used to validate XML files I’ll be making for my online courses. Well, being a newbie to XSD files (though not XML), I was making decent but very slow progress …

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