1.#mLearnCon 2011 Backchannel – Collected Resources

This post collects the resources shared via the backchannel of the mLearnCon 2011, that was held between June 21 and 23 in San Jose, California.

2. Why You Need a Mobile Learning Strategy

Not having a strategy for mobile learning is itself a strategy. And not a very effective one at that. Understanding the decision criteria for mLearning, and having a plan for periodically reviewing those criteria and their performance against those criteria, designers and managers are in a much better position to make good decisions about how they will support learning in their organizations. This is just one of the many reasons why you need a mobile learning strategy. Know more here.

3. How To Make The Right Call With Mobile Learning

The popularity of smartphones and tablets in the workplace has increased the interest in mobile learning. But with the mobile landscape constantly evolving, many organizations are asking themselves if now is the right time to take the plunge, or if they should wait for more stability. Know how to make the right call.

4. Quick and Simple mLearning Content for the iPhone

Getting started developing eLearning content is relatively easy; however mLearning is a different ball game altogether. The challenge is manifold: finding easy-to-use development tools, developing for multiple devices, and most importantly, determining the right context for the mLearning content. This article provides you with a very basic vehicle for creating simple mLearning content, so that you can get started quickly, see what’s possible, understand the pitfalls, and begin to figure out how you might blend mLearning into your existing training or learning strategy.

5. What Are Mobile Devices Teaching Your Kids?

Mobile learning blends traditional pedagogy with technology to reach every child. The question is not if your child should use a mobile device in school, but how to do it safely. Know it here.

6.What Exactly Can You Learn On A Mobile Phone?

Understand how a mobile phone can be considered a learning tool, and whether it can actually help bridge the digital divide between low-income, at-risk kids and those with access to computers.

7. 13 Helpful Mobile Web Design Tools & Resources

Here are 13 mobile web design resources that’ll make it easy for you to deliver a snappy but aesthetically pleasing mobile web experience.

8. How 3 Mobile Gadgets are Transforming our Lives: New Research

So how are the 3 mobile devices changing our lives and disrupting stable industries. Know what the latest research from Nielsen reveals after speaking to 12,000 mobile connected device owners about what we are doing with the 3 mobile gadgets that are changing habits.

9.HTML5 – Opportunities for Mobile Devices

HTML5 offers amazing opportunities to us for designing and developing formal and informal learning solutions. So get ready to add mLearning with HTML5 to your learning and development repertoire.

10. 7 iPad Habits of Highly Effective Remote Workers

The use of the iPad by mobile workers is on the rise, and that brings with it both boons and challenges for worker productivity. Here’s how you and your remote staff can stay on top of iPad usage, lest iPad usage controls you and your organization instead.

11. Are Tablets Made for the Education Market Doomed

Does the demise of both the Kno and the enTourage eDGe, aimed squarely at the educational market, indicate that post-PC future doesn’t look too good for education-only devices? Know more about it here.

12. Infographic: iPad Usage In The UK

What’s the media diet of an iPad user? Digital marketing production house Imano surveyed 2,000 UK iPad users in May to find out.

13. Infographic: The Enterprise Mobile Explosion

Companies worldwide are incorporating mobile technology and applications into their operations to increase productivity and revenue and reduce paperwork. This explosion in the use of mobile devices in the enterprise will help to fuel demand for mobile apps, as this infographic shows.

The post 13 Top Learning, Technology & Media Links: Weekly Digest – 25 first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Primarily, it reads the binary SWF file and renders its animation and audio content to standard web compliant format. The Smokescreen project demos are available at this the smokescreen’s website, these demos will work on the HTML5 compatible browsers Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, Safari 4 and Opera 10.53.

Here’s is what Simon Willison has to say about Smokescreen:

Chris Smoak’s Smokescreen, “a Flash player written in JavaScript”, is an incredible piece of work. It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.

This is just a beginning and there are several benefits for mLearning developers as with Smokescreen they will be able develop content using existing Flash skills and run it across all the mobile device browsers. Although the project is still in the initial stages and for now is targeted only at advertisers. I feel it has potential to improve over time and allow complex animations and interactions developed in Flash to work on Flash disabled mobile platforms. Apple’s blocking Flash has actually pushed the developers to innovate and essentially develop the Flash player in HTML5 and JavaScript. I wouldn’t be surprised to see future releases of Adobe’s Flash Professional publishing HTML5 compatible output.

The post Smokescreen – The Future Of Flash Player? first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Yes, HTML5 is a major revision over its predecessor HTML4. Some pertinent questions need to be asked.

Is it ready for eLearning Development?
More specifically- Is it ready to compete with Flash for eLearning Development?

I think HTML5 still has some real constraints and it may not replace Flash for eLearning/mLearning development in near future. In fact I believe it may not replace Flash at all. Here are a few reasons why–

Browsers Lack HTML5 Full Support – While making HTML5 the de-facto standard Apple seems to have forgotten that none of the web browsers for mobile or desktop have full HTML 5 implementations at this time. Internet Explorer ( IE 6, 7 and 8 ) the most widely used web browsers has no support for HTML5. The new version (IE 9) which is expected to be released sometime in 2011will support HTML5. Check out this website that can test HTML5 support in a browser. What’s really surprising is that even Apple iPad Safari browser doesn’t have full HTML5 support.

Cross Platform / Browser Compatibility – Every browser has its own rendering mechanism so an application developed for iPad Safari is not guaranteed to work well in other browsers like IE, Firefox or Chrome. Developers will have to make modifications in code to make it work in different browsers. This is not the case with plugins like Flash or Silverlight where the applications once developed can run on all the browsers without any modifications. I’d think this issue with web browsers will probably remain even after they have all implemented full HTML5 support.

Audio/Video Support – HTML5 has added new video and audio tags that can play video/audio in a browser without a plugin but it doesn’t officially support any video or audio format. A few browsers like Firefox support Ogg Theora (an open source format) while others like Safari support H.264 (this is a proprietary format and licensing fee is required to support this format). This Wikipedia article provides more details about HTML5 video support. Content developers who plan to use HTML5 for delivering video or audio content have to spend more time in encoding the videos to Ogg Theora and to H.264 formats so that all major browsers are supported, but this is not sufficient as IE doesn’t support the video tag and would not be able to play the video or audio file without a plug-in. On the other hand, Flash supports FLV/FV4 formats and those are not browser dependent. Also, Flash or Silverlight video/audio supports secure media streaming; there is no clear counterpart for this in HTML5. The use of Video in eLearning is only going to increase, so this is going to be a big issue for developers going forward.

Development Tools – There are no tools available (except Dreamweaver CS5 which was released just last week and I still have to figure out its HTML5 support) that can create animations for HTML5 having a good designer developer workflow required to create quality graphics and animations like Flash Professional. To create animations with HTML5 developers have to code animations using JavaScript and CSS. A task which tools like Flash professional can do in minutes may take hours, if not days, to do using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. And even if they do, I doubt the final HTML5 output would be as good as what we get from Flash.

These are just a few reasons why HTML5 is not ready for web or eLearning development and technologies like Flash or Silverlight will still prevail until HTML5 (CSS3 and JavaScript) doesn’t overcome its constraints.

The post Is HTML5 Ready for eLearning Development? first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Those of you have heard of HTML 5 will know it’s a new version of HTML and XHTML being promoted by Google and Apple in a bid to move the web away from proprietary technologies like Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX. It makes HTML more powerful by adding new elements like video and audio. A list of new elements in HTML 5 can be found here at IBM’s site and the draft specification is available here at W3C’s site.

So what’s the big deal?
Well, let’s take a quick look at some of the new elements included and you’ll know.

Canvas – Web developers can now create 2D drawings controlled by JavaScript. This would help in creating interactive graphs, games, and presentations easily. Key benefit is that web developers can do this using JavaScript directly in HTML 5 without relying on technologies like Flash or Silverlight. Here is a quick tip. While you are considering to design your website, always seek professional help from agencies who extend such srevices. You can avail the affordable web design perth for instance.

Video & Audio – You can play video or audio in HTML 5 WITHOUT any plug-in required (like Flash or Silverlight], simply by using the new audio and video markup tags.

The working draft of HTML 5 indicates a need to find suitable open source code which works on all browsers without licensing or patent fee. The Mozilla Foundation has already implemented the open source Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis codecs for video in the beta of Firefox 3.5 and Opera is also working on similar lines. To add to this Dailymotion has launched a new R&D platform, dedicated to open source video format and has announced that it would be re-encoding 300,000 videos to Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats. We believe this could well be the ultimate threat to Flash which currently has monopolistic control in delivering videos online.

Interactive Elements – details, datagrid, command & menu
These are interactive elements included for development of web applications. The plan is to include more such elements in the future. This would help the web developers display data in structured formats and make it easier to implement. This could ultimately prove a big threat to the open source Flex Framework [while it uses proprietary Flash technology] – one of the preferred platforms for developing RIAs these days.

How does HTML 5 affect eLearning Development?
HTML and Flash are most commonly used today for developing elearning content. HTML is used for simple ‘page-turner’ type of courses while Flash is used for interactive courses that contain animations and/or audio. Like most other eLearning developers, we prefer developing content using Flash over HTML because HTML can’t support rich vector graphics with animations essential for delivering an engaging learning experience.

However HTML 5 has the potential to change all that. If developers can create animations, play audio and video without having to depend on Flash or Silverlight that would excellent. HTML 5 is particularly useful for organizations with ‘no plug-in’ policy because it will render natively in HTML 5 capable browsers. Also HTML 5 would help create more platform independent applications which can run across browsers eliminating the need for testing on multiple browsers.

So is Flash Dead?
No, not just yet! Flash (or perhaps Silverlight in near future) would still be useful for developing high-end interactive courses and games based learning. Flash Professional has a very good designer developer workflow which is important in eLearning development. It remains to be seen what workflows emerge for development in HTML 5 and if they can be adapted for eLearning development.

Most importantly – it’s a dampener – HTML 5 is not going to be around anytime soon. The final draft of HTML 5 specifications will be ready by 2012! According to Ian Hickson (a Google employee and a co-editor of HTML 5 specification) the proposed date of release would be in 2022 – which is 13 VERY LONG years from now. Since browser developers have committed support and started working on including essential HTML 5 tags, we could realistically start seeing some eLearning development in HTML 5 by the end of 2010, of-course with some constraints. A serious push for eLearning development in HTML 5 is still some years away. Till then Flash and Silverlight can breathe easy. However, they must quite rest; they must try making more progress on their products to force HTML 5 to do additional catching up. You can bet Adobe will not let one of its acquired cash cows (Flash) die easily.

Ryan Stewart [a platform evangelist for Adobe] has made an interesting comparison between HTML 5 and Flash in this blog post which shows that there is a lot of work required before HTML could actually reach to the level of Flash Player 10.

Here is a video Ian explaining how HTML 5 works for the techie folk who may like to see it in action:

The post HTML 5 and eLearning Development first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.