Opinions, essays and off-the-cuff posts about anything from e-learning and web standards to home automation and general nerdery.
The new whitehouse.gov site has received a lot of press since its unveiling a few days ago. Many have rightly given it kudos for bringing a modern sense of design and “Web 2.0”-style social practices to the White House. I agree that the new site is a big improvement, but upon looking under the hood, there are a number of things I’d have done differently. Here’s a quick-hit list (not comprehensive at all)…
While working on a recent web project at work, I wondered if I should go for a fixed-width layout or stick with my preference for fluid layouts. Fixed-width layouts are certainly easier to manage, but they just feel so… rigid. With the boom in larger monitors, I also wondered if fluid sites start presenting a problem due to being too wide. I decided to check around the web to see what others are doing.
Matt Wilcox posted an interesting argument about the CSS3 standard; I think the central points of the argument can be applied to SCORM and where we’re potentially headed with SCORM 2.0.
I’m working on an HTML-based course interface that serves up content in an iframe. I had everything working great until I needed to move the content to one domain while hosting the interface on a different domain (kind of a simplified home-brewed CMS approach). BAM! Cross-domain security issues. Course interface dead in the water.
A quickie post about FlashCamp and Flash CS4
SCO stands for shareable content object. If a course is not built to be shareable, it isn’t really a SCO, even if it uses SCORM for packaging. Spinning SCORM’s communication element off into its own standard — without the name SCORM — would free SCORM to truly be a Shareable Content Object Reference Model, and would free non-aggregators from having to deal with the complexities of SCORM.
A common thread in many of the posts I’ve been reading is that standards do not lead to innovation, but rather that innovation leads to standardization.
Thoughts and an addendum for my SCORM 2.0 white paper submission
Most e-learning developers don’t care about SCORM and only (begrudingly) learn enough to get the job done. I don’t blame them. This brings up the never-ending question when it comes to using SCORM in courseware: What are you really trying to do with SCORM?
The transition is almost complete: I have ditched my Windows-based PC for a MacBook Pro.
