eLearning Roadtrip

Roadtrip Service Announcement - 26TH Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning

Registration is now open for the 26th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning - August 4 - 6, 2010 in Madison, WIsconsin, home of the University of Wisconsin, my alma mater.

This year’s conference provides over 20 workshops and events on Wednesday, August 4th, many focused on higher education issues, followed by over 130 concurrent sessions and special events on Thursday and Friday, August 5th & 6th. You may access a PDF of this year’s Conference Program, sign up for future mailings, follow on Facebook and Twitter, and register for the conference from the Web site.

I personally like that it takes place in Madison Wisconsin. As an alum of the real UW,X2, I always like a reason to go back and visit. I also love Madison in the summer, so August 4 - 6 is a great time to be there. (bratwurst and beer on the Terrace overlooking Lake Monona...priceless!)

But the main reason I like to go is that I always get such a good look at what is happening in the various facets of academic distance learning, which as most people who follow higher education know is going through an explosion of mainstream adoption. Even the University of California has discovered the online university!! It's different that what happens at a policy-and-practice event like the one hosted by WCET (this year - LaJolla, CA, November 2010)  More focused on things that matter for distance learning than EDUCAUSE. More pragmatic than Sloan's research or emerging tech conferences.

Several of my colleagues from WCET will be there to tell people about Transparency by Design, a project of the Presidents' Forum funded by the Lumina Foundation, to create  a data driven, consumer oriented website comparing post-secondary universities from the for-profit sector, not-for-profit sector and public sector for prospective students looking to evaluate and compare online learning institutions.

If you DO plan to go to the conference, don't wait too long to get registered and get your hotel room booked if you want to overlook the lake.

Mobile Browser Stats

Here is an interesting factoid from Peter Pinch, Director of WGBH (Boston public television) regarding the breakdown of mobile traffic on their national interactive sites during the past month (which I presume is for the month of April 2010):

• mSafari 74%
• Android 16%
• Blackberry 6.5%
• WinMobile 1.5%
• Symbian 1%

Makes me wonder about the possibility of a direct positive correlation between public television fans and Apple customers.

A Few More Links about Apple Adobe and Flash

Here are a few more of my favorite Apple links of the fast several weeks. Some are informative, several just plain funny. I challenge you to tell me which is which.

Ron Miller wonders is Steve Jobs may be right about Adobe.

Apple gives Adobe the finger with its new SDK agreement

Who is Grey Powell and why did he leave his iPhone 4.0 prototype in a bar?

Police seize computers at the home of Gizmodo editor over "lost iPhone 4.0" flap

Jon Stewart's rant about the lost 4G phone brouhaha, in which he called Apple "appholes"

Ellen DeGeneres apologizes for skit that makes fun at her iPhone texting abilities. Apple wasn't amused.

Data suggesting that Flash content reaches 99% of all Internet viewers. 3rd party results, reported by Adobe.

Apple WW Developer Conference 2010 sells out for first time.

Links to Highlights of the Apple-Adobe Wars.

For all of you who are as fascinated by the Apple-Adobe Flash standoff as I am, here are some links to some of my personal favorite blog posts and articles capturing the highlights of the situation.

As a certain CEO of a certain industry trade association recently commented, "Apple antics are the best soap opera out there! I like watching it better than The Tudors!"

• A very thoughtful piece on the fight between Adobe and Apple
• You can find a pretty good info-mercial for the Adobe Flash Platform by clicking here
• Steve Jobs calls Google "evil" and Adobe " lazy.
• (PS you can buy "Evil and Lazy" t-shirts and coffee mugs from Zazzle, here.)
• My favorite cartoon (and my blogpost) on the subject.
• This is what Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch had to say about Flash being excluded from iPads
• Here is Adobe Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow's angry post to Apple
• Here is a link to Steve Job's Letter about Flash
• IT security pro James Arlen thinks the iPad's anti-Flash design will be the death of Adobe's troubled software.  I had no idea Flash was in such dire shape.
• A recent article in CNET indicated that a lack of Flash didn't have much to do with reasons for NOT buying iPads.
  
• Former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen and Bill Gates chiding Adobe????? 
• Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan responds. So does CTO Kevin Lynch.
• Direct from the W3C - The latest on HTML5
  
• Opera (the mobile operating system) jumps into the Apple Adode kerfuffle.

There's plenty more where these come from. Just wanted to be sure to share a few of my favorites. Enjoy!

A Flash Primer for Non-Techies

Do you know what Flash is?

It's a serious question. During the past few months, volumes and volumes have been written about Flash. It's dead.  It's dying. It's lazy, buggy and bloated. It's everywhere. It's efficient, it makes the web work. It's ubiquitous. It creates rich, engaging digital experience. It is going to drive the knowledge commerce economy. It's proprietary. It is irrelevant. In its future iterations, it's where the mobile Web is headed. Yadda-yadda-yadda.

I've been finding myself defending Flash lately.  Let me be clear - I am not being a complete and total fangrrl. here.  This is less about loving Flash and more about really despising less-than-accurate information being used to sway opinions on the scale that we've been seeing in the media-verse. Bitch-slaps from Apple, gnashing of teeth and lighting of candles over HTML5. Microsoft needling from the sidelines. It's not to say that these aren't hugely important developments, because they are. But some of the common wisdom going around these days about both is simply not accurate. And some of THIS arises from the fact that people aren't quite sure what Flash really is.

So. Seriously. Whaddya think?

Well... You don't need to be embarrassed if you don't know. It's surprising how many people, especially non-technical experts, really aren't sure what Flash is.

Here are a few hints:

• It's a free media player available on the web. You need it to view SWF files  - movies, video, animations and so on - on the Web. Except on iPhones and iPads. And that's too bad. But as you will see, this is a an important but relatively small part of the big picture. Comes in two flavors, Flash Player and AIR.
• It's a web animation scripting tool. Generally goes by the name of Flash Professional.
• It provides a way to share video on the web. The current Flash Player supports the open H.264 video spec, by the way.
• It's a vector graphics program. Ideally suited for designing content once once and reusing it many times for a variety of display screens. As long as the content is designed to be reused. If it's not, it won't work. But then it really isn't a Flash problem. That's a design problem.
• It's a file format. Most commonly known as SWF. Like PDF for web content. For example, you build your animated content as FLV or FLA,  you publish as SWF. It's locked down. People can't get inside and mess around with your files. Sometimes designers create big monster Flash files that have lots of problems. That's usually more attributable to bad design than to Flash, the scripting tool.
• It's the foundation of most non-technical authoring for rapid elearning. In other words, many rapid elearning tools produce SWF files. In fact, there are so many SWF tools that there are entire websites dedicated to sharing information about them.
• It's a published web specification. There are no restrictions on its use. Really. More on that in a minute.
• It's the foundation of the elearning industry and it is going to take a while for the industry to evolve away from Flash. Yes, innovators will continue pushing to find better and faster ways to create and share digital experience. HTLM5 will certainly drive that shift. But for now this is where a lot of the industry is going to remain as we move through hype cycles and adoption curves.

Here is the nut of the situation. In layman's terms, HTML5 is being developed as the next major revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML. It aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apache Pivot, and Sun JavaFX. And that's great for people who want to program. But people who don't want to program are going to want tools to build HTML5 programs and apps.

(Psssssst. Remember HTML? Can you spell D-r-e-a-m-w-e-a-v-e-r ???)

Another important part of this whole discussion is that Steve Jobs hates Flash and doesn't want Flash anywhere near his universe. Which is too bad, given how much revenue gets driven for Apple with each release of Adobe design tools.

Two important points to raise in this discussion. The first is what to do about the Flash embargo on Apple mobile hardware for elearning professionals.The fact that Steve Jobs wants to keep the iPhone and iPad experience free from Flash is an Apple  business decision. I've talked to developers who are fine with this decision. And this won't present a challenge to companies with the technical acumen and business flexibility to specialize around Apple. Not all businesses, particularly elearning businesses, have that flexibility. At least not yet.

In the age of open there are many people who would rather not use proprietary tools because they don't want their money going to evil corporations. Open is free. Let me offer this alternative point of view. To paraphrase Scott McNeeley, open is free as a puppy is free. Those of us who really have to do business using the web, where writing everything from scratch is not an option, need supported, maintained software and SaaS.

As the Web has "gone mobile", and there are increasingly more that screens involved in sharing rich digital content and experience, it made sense for Adobe to think about ways to emancipate Flash. To that end, the Open Screen Project was announced May 1, 2008.  This is a project and many other industry leading companies that want to reliably deliver rich Web and video experiences live and on-demand across a variety of devices.  Adobe has open access to Adobe Flash technology, accelerating the deployment of content and rich Internet applications (RIAs), including:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications.
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees - making future releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

I've copied the list of current partners from the Open Screen Project website below. I know I could paste a link to that page. But then I wouldn't be reasonably sure that you had seen who is a part of this initiative:

Adobe
AMD
Antena 3
Atlantic Records
ARM
BBC
Burda Digital Systems
CELL
Chunghwa Telecom
Cisco
Comcast
Condé Nast
Daum
Disney Interactive Media Group
EPIX
FOX Mobile Group
Freescale Semiconductor
Google
HTC
Imagination Technologies

Intel
LG Electronics
Lionsgate
Marvell
MIPS Technologies
Motorola
Movial
MTV Networks
NBC Universal
Nokia
NTT DOCOMO
NVIDIA
OpenPeak
OpenTV
Palm
Paramount
PBS
Qualcomm

QNX Software Systems
Research in Motion
RTL Interactive
Sagemcom
Samsung
Sonic Solutions
Sony Ericsson
ST-Ericsson
STMicroelectronics
STERN
Symbian Foundation
Teleca
Texas Instruments
The New York Times
Tomorrow Focus Technologies
Toshiba
Verizon Wireless
Vizio
Wind River
ZiiLABS

Look. What a surprise. No Apple. And that matters. But pretty clearly Apple really isn't the only game in town.

There is no doubt that Flash will continue to evolve and change. I'm fairly certain that the HTML5 specifications will making today's plug-in tools unnecessary and that Flash as we know it today won't be around for the ages. We many never see Flash on iPads or whatever they evolve into. But knowing how long it takes for enterprise adoption of innovation to occur, I think many of us are going to  keep Flash in our toolkits for a while.

Before You Get Too Twisted about Flash and HTML5

During the past several weeks, the tech press, Twitter-verse and Blogosphere have been filled with news, pronouncements, diatribes and debates regarding the future of Flash. Or more specifically, the death of Flash.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, I would like to suggest that the reports of Flash's death are greatly exaggerated. Not because I am necessarily an Adobe fangirl. Anyone who has followed this blog knows that every so often I have poked at my former employer. But on this topic I think Adobe is getting a bad rap. And here's why.

When it comes to HTML5...Adobe has been watching HTML5 developments as actively as anyone else from the very beginning and continues to be involved in those web standards developments. It's not like this is a surprise. The web evolves because the tools evolve. Today's Flash is nothing like the vector graphics animation program called Future Splash, where it came from. Who knows how tomorrow's Flash will evolve. From Future Splash to Flash-for-animation to Flash for RIAs and beyond...

Remember that Dreamweaver was created as an HTML tool? Why WOULDN'T Adobe be thinking about creating HTML5 tools? A specification - or a standard - is NOT the same as a development platform! Still gotta have a way to create assets that conform to the spec, right??

HTML5 has a long way to go before it is ready for prime time. People need to remember its an evolving standard....which means that some parts of HTML5 are proprietary (or at least not yet published/approved by a standards body) and probably will be for several years. That part of the standards debate doesn't get mentioned so often. So let me repeat: Some part of the evolving HTML5 specification are currently proprietary. e.g. MPEG4's licensing requirements.

Which bring me to a personal pet peeve about this particular debate: The notion that Flash is closed and proprietary, while HTML5 is open. Macromedia and later Adobe have always been committed to extensibility, which means that people can modify and "extend" functionality from the core Flash code. Adobe has published APIs and produced plug-ins. As RIAs have emerged on the scene Adobe builds bridges between open source components.

More recently, Adobe published the SWF specification and have released licensing agreements as part of the Open Screen Project in May of 2008. And even before the SWF spec was published on its way to being released as a standard, Adobe had licensed .SWF to lots of companies. A 2008 survey of Flash tools sponsored by Adobe and conducted by the eLearning Guild showed that 52% of all Flash tools do NOT come from Adobe. Adobe has a lot of Flash producing tools...Presenter, Captivate, Flash Professional, Connect, Flex to name a few. But there are lots of other SWF tools out there, as well. NOT from Adobe.

A few years ago, when it was clear that PDF had become virtually ubiquitous, Adobe released it to OASIS, who approved it as a published standard. Adobe has done the same thing with .SWF and the Open Screen Project in recognition of Flash's ubiquity. No doubt this comes from a position of enlightened self-interest. But in fairness, turning a de facto standard into a de jure standard is kind of a cool thing to do.  The market has already chosen. Adobe is not forcing people down a path where a few others think it ought to go.

One more thing - blaming Flash for bad Flash apps is a little bit like blaming hammers for poorly constructed buildings.

I expect I'll have a few more things to say on this subject. Stay tuned.