Here are my screenshots, and I’ll share some overview of the apps I’m playing with at the moment.

My Home Screens

Screen 1

• Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Maps
• Photobucket, Videos, YoutTube, App Store
• Settings, Adobe Ideas, CourseNotes, Evernote
• GoodReader, iAnnotate PDF, iBooks, Kindle
• Pages, Numbers, Bento, Keynote

Screen 2

• Instapaper, Notes Pro, BBC News, Star Walk
• TweetDeck, The Weather Channel, WolframAlpha, WordPress
• WordBook XL, 1Password, WorldFactbook, GoToMeeting
• WebEx, Deliveries, Dictation, Corkulous
• Taska

Screen 3

• Magic Piano, Glee, iELECTRIBE, Harbor Master
• Marvel, Netflix, ABC Player, Pandora
• iTunes

Apps I’m Interested In…

Corkulous

The Corkulous desktop

I was very much looking for a GTD app that I could administer on the iPad.  I’ve been an avowed fan of Appigo’s ToDo app for iPhone and was hoping to find some news on their site of a version in development for iPad.  I couldn’t find any.  What I did find was a really sweet and easy-to-use idea board, much like what Mark Oehlert (@moehlert) used with Pimdax for the Social Learning Camp.  So… I’m giving this a try.  You can create labels (with the scotch tape), post-it notes, affix pictures, assign contacts to sections and create boards within boards.  This could prove to be really handy.

iWork (and Bento)

Keynote, one of the iWork apps for iPad

One thing I am going to do a lot of in my new role is give presentations. A LOT of presentations.  I’m also going to attend of a lot of meetings and conferences, so note-taking is really helpful.  One thing I did this last week at the ADL Registry & Repository Summit was generate a pie chart on the fly — iWork helps with all of that, and I’m hoping that the iPad proves to be a fairly efficient vehicle to do those things on the fly.  It is not as easy or as fast as a real keyboard, but it does take up a lot less space on a regular airline seat.  I would appreciate a less hinky way of getting documents on and off the iPad than mailing them to myself or syncing through iTunes… but it does work, so like other apps, I’ll be investigating over he next couple of months how useful this really is.

KORG iELECTRIBE

KORG iELECTRIBE

I’ve really enjoyed several of the synth apps on my iPhone, but they’re basically toys.  My fat fingers have never mistaken the phone for an instrument… but this beautiful app not only has rekindled the fourteen year-old that would spend nights and weekends programming his Casio CZ-1, it’s captivating my daughters as my five year-old is programming rhythms she wants to dance to.  This app is 100% win and probably the most dangerous force against my productivity.  I know to non-music people, this interface looks cramped and complicated, but even if you were never into synthesizers and drum machines, this is really easy to use.  The size is absolutely perfect. Do you sense that I’m gushing? Because I am.

Star Walk

Star Walk

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been back in parts of the country that have stars come out at night and you can see them ALL.  Can you guess which is the easiest constellation to find? The Little Dipper. You might think that the Big Dipper is the easiest constellation you can find, but Big Dipper is not even a constellation — it’s a part of Ursa Major (they’re not the same thing).  Little Dipper and Ursa Minor are the same thing.  If you can find Polaris, which is the North Star, and you can figure out the Little Dipper, then you can relate other constellations in relation to it, and spatially learn in proximity about all the constellations.

Notes Pro vs. CourseNotes

Notes Pro

CouseNotes

I grabbed CourseNotes first, and I think it has some very compelling uses as a general note-taking tool.  Many of the subjects I’m researching have vocabularies that are difficult to master (or keep straight), so the built-in ability to define and capture lexicon (taxonomy) got me thinking about organization and note-taking in a whole new way.  When a $2.99 app can do that to me, it’s definitely a win.  Because of that, I started using VoodooPad on my laptop for the same purpose (btw, if you ever wanted a desktop wiki, you should give it a look — nigh powerful, fast becoming the most-used app on my laptop).  In contrast, Notes Pro seems to have everything and the kitchen sink in the app and it’s free.  It’s a little unstructured for me.  CourseNotes might be a tad bit too rigid.  I’m hoping maturity and passionate users and developers cooperate and make use of feedback to improve both apps and thus affect all note-taking apps on the iPad.  I’m giving the edge to CourseNotes by a wide margin right now, but Notes Pro has one thing going for it that would make CourseNotes killer — that’s persistence, because it syncs via Twitter, Facebook or Google account with the cloud so you won’t lose your data.  CourseNotes needs this.

Taska

Taska

I wanted Appigo’s ToDo for iPad. It doesn’t exist.

I use Toodledo to sync my GTD in the cloud. I’m still stunned that seemingly none of the Mac apps (Things, The Hit List, OmniFocus) sync with the cloud (much less Google Tasks, even). But at least there’s a Toodledo app for iPad and there’s Taska.  The Toodledo native app looks well and good, but Taska looks pretty.  I like being aple to switch tabs between tags, contexts and lists. It supports projects like Appigo and the sync mostly works with Toodledo.  I’m still suspect about it, but we’ll see how this works out… maybe I won’t need another app for my GTD mojo.

Tune in or download the show. Here’s the details:

Pravir is the author of “Connecting Inner Power with Global Change: The Fractal Ladder” and while it’s a deep read, it’s a rewarding book for introducing the concept that there are emergent patterns that scale.  Sometimes they scale with consequences we don’t quite expect or necessarily want, but understanding how fractal patterns work (think floret to stalk of brocolli) we can scale the good we want to see in ourselves to the good we want to see in our workgroups (and beyond).

Now, you might be asking yourself, what the heck I’m doing on this panel for this topic.  Well, the main theme for tomorrow’s discussion is this:

• What shifts are you seeing in the environment or market within which your organization plays?
• Why do you think these shifts are occuring?
• How are you organizing to manage this?

Well, the market for learning technology, specifically in the area of “E-Learning” by its narrow definition, is rife with patterns of mediocrity such that a frightening majority of content — what’s supposed to develop employees in organizations around the world  – is nothing more than hour long PowerPoint slides, passively asking the user to click next to continue.  This isn’t every piece of content, but there’s an awful lot of it around.

Organizations continue to accept this because, quite frankly, there has been no other kernel presented to them in the same medium that would inspire duplication such that a new pattern would emerge.  How does this scale? Well, how engaged can an employee be when the official messages from their organization are so unfeeling, rote and lifeless as bad slide decks that are paced and required to be seen in full?

The thing is, imho, there are alternative patterns emerging in the field of adult learning that recognize value in community and, at the very least, interpersonal interaction.  Such organizations are moving away from the last ten years of design production practice and they are embracing more organic (to their organizations) approaches to developing employees, even letting employees coach each other and emerge as subject matter networks within communities of practice.

These have their own challenges. They’re not easy challenges to address, but they are very interesting challenges.  One such challenge? Keeping experts engaged in their communities, when they are most likely to approach a state of “disregard.”

How we develop our people affects the whole economy.  When we decide that cramming a couple slides with bullet points and charts is better than nothing — well, that may be true in the instance.  However, it reinforces a fractal pattern that translates when scaled to “we value cheaper and faster above anything else.”  That sounds harsh, but if we’re going to combat the bad with the good, we need to get comfortable with talking about what we don’t like and have the courage and perseverence to reinforce new patterns.

At work, our team once had no skills or capability to produce media.  For less than $100, we were able to produce video and audio.  We’ve taken that train as far as it goes, and leaders grew discontent with the quality of the audio and video we could produce.  Still, we kept doing it.  Why? Because they didn’t care enough to want to pay for something better.

I’ve spent the better part of two days re-evaluating the tools we have and what capabilities they provide for our team, in terms of media production.  When we began building E-Learning content ourselves, there was no budget and no appreciation for media, so everything had to be guerilla-style.

What is guerilla-style multimedia? It’s multimedia production on the cheap. I selected a small, $40 FlexMic (from MacMice) that was a USB condenser microphone, which provides better audio quality than the unpowered microphones that plug into your Audio-In port on your computer.  We put a pop-screen together out of a coat hanger and panty hose (I read that one online a few years back). For video, I picked up a Flip Camera (which ended up getting adopted throughout the organization where people wanted to do video).

When we had no media capability and no business case to make, this gave us a set of tools which enabled only so much.  I’m now proud to say that our leadership is demanding better quality audio and better quality video, and that after two years we’re now easily making the business case it will take to significantly advance our ability to produce such multimedia in-house.

Sometimes to please people, you have to make them aware of the pain their own lack of investment causes.  You must withstand the countless retakes someone will make you do before a leader realizes that it’s the quality of the tools you’re using that prevents desired results. You must be ready with a plan to improve (and you must deliver on that plan).

Many organizations tend to value the diving catch; they should be valuing the people who prevent the need for diving catches but it’s largely not in our nature.  Designers, by definition of wanting to design the “right” experiences, tend to fight this head-on.  As a disruptive practice, I advise leveraging this cultural moray. Do the best job you can with the tools you have and continue to work on the plan to level up.  That way when the idea to improve becomes a leader’s idea, you have a solid plan to help that leader execute flawlessly.  You can make the diving catch.

The problem I run into more often than anything is that I don’t seem to have a lot of friends.  More to the point, despite how many hundreds of actual friends I have, we never seem to be online, playing the same game at the same time and aware of each other so we can play together.  The exchange of friend codes on the Wii is so ridiculously complicated, I imagine that it is so much better on XBox because of all the Microsoft integration, allowing you to port friends lists in and out of the platform.  I love the Wii for so many things, but the amount of work some of my friends put into manually managing their friends in each game, and scheduling times to play with each other online… it seems like a lot of work and I wonder how often it actually does work.

While there’s no consistent friend management on the iPhone, most online multiplayers I’ve installed hook up with Facebook Connect to put you in league with friends.

That still is a limiter, however.  Case in point? Scrabble, which has a pretty clean and obvious multiplayer component using Facebook.  You can play Scrabble on the web, through Facebook, or on the iPhone; both methods are portals to the same game which is what I’d expect to happen.  Compare this setup to Mafia Wars, which has a web-based portal outside of Facebook, a web-based portal in Facebook and the iPhone application — at least the iPhone and the Facebook portals have no means of playing the same game.  So my 147th level Mogul? Completely inaccessible to me on the iPhone, where I needed to start from scratch — which is why I uninstalled Mafia Wars not two seconds after figuring that out.

Unfortunately, even though I know a lot of Scrabble players, we’re never playing together at the same time.  Scrabble at least can hook me up with someone on Facebook that *is* playing when I’m playing (at the moment of starting a game), but that’s the only point of shared awareness.  If my opponent makes her move, I still need to either launch Scrabble to find out about it or launch Facebook to get the alert (or get the alert texted to my phone, etc). Unless there are several of us playing the same game on the same WiFi network, Scrabble can’t find anyone playing right nearby me, which is something I might prefer.

I deconstruct this part of the multiplayer experience in games to highlight one common gap that BAQON is intended to solve.  Gamers benefit from having location-aware and situation-aware services that connect them to their friends or potential friends nearby them, regardless of how they’re accessing the same (or similar) game.  It seems to me that if I’m limited only to playing with people on my wifi network OR people with Facebook accounts OR people playing on iPhones — that’s still not nearly as many candidates for meaningful connection or competition as ALL of those people, plus people who are playing the same game in the same place but through their cell service AND people who are playing the game who don’t belong to Facebook AND people playing the game on anything but an iPhone.

So, it’s not obvious for people who know me now as opposed to 9-10 years ago, but I used to build web-based games for kids 6-12.  I was producing them (writing up proposals, managing the project) and developing them (coding in ActionScript, programatic animations, architecture in Flash).  I worked with a team that produced the media and handled the server-side code and database layers.  This was my first job after teaching, and I loved it.  Making games was fun and I was very good at it.

There are many ways in which developing games is easier now.  For one thing developers now have frameworks to employ, like OpenFeint to handle high score boards, username, in-game purchases, unlockable items, etc.  On the other hand, games are so much more complicated now.  There’s more competition, your user base is savvier and likely more casual and definitely more interested in connecting with their friends and competition — all things you need to design and develop for.  You’re still largely responsible for maintaining or paying someone to maintain a backend to the game you want to build and that takes a huge chunk of resources to accomplish.  You’re nailed if you build a game no one wants to play, and you’re doubly nailed if you build a game that becomes so hot that you can’t handle the scale of adoption.

If you’re going to be building a game that touches the internet, I think you’re going to be interested in BAQON.  BAQON will provide your players with the ability to connect with each other based on location.  The intention is that BAQON will work with identity services like Facebook Connect or Google or MSN or… pick a service.  What we’re hoping you won’t need to do anymore is deal with is all the effort it takes to deal with your own backend for highscores and multiplayer awareness.  BAQON is not a socket server, but it should make it much easier to create interoperable real-time gaming experiences.  In that respect, I think it’s going to accelerate a lot of game development.

For one thing, if you’re a game developer and you don’t have to worry about maintaining a back-end system to mitigate your high scoreboards, even that by itself, probably saves you a huge boatload of time, money and resources.  This allows you, as a developer of a small game to focus on the actual game — not the servicing of things that aren’t the game.

If you’re a game developer with multiple titles, the ability to create an entry parlour where players can get line of sight into who’s playing what games of yours locally should help to expose new players to your other titles.  After all, as gamers are becoming more social, gamers will want more gaming experiences they can actually share with each other — almost impossible to do that right now, even with the emergence of location-aware gaming devices.  Now, people playing a game in one location may have line of sight into all the games being played in the same location.

By abstracting out persistent gaming information, you can enable multiple points of entry into shared game experiences.  This means you can potentially build games on multiple platforms and it’s all the same game.  When World of Warcraft launched, it was revolutionary because Macs and PCs could play with each other.  How many of the thousands of game titles around allow users to play with each other across platforms? It feels like it’s mainly the web-based titles, and as I use the iPhone I see that the stovepipes are still around. I believe we’ll help solve for it.

My question for you: if you’re building games and/or are gaming actively, what am I missing?

What we’re looking to do is to accelerate development of a new generation of applications for collaboration, communication, information exchange, learning and gaming where experiences can be persistent, interoperable and still contextualized (// vision). Our plan is to enable such development through a well documented and open (// free) set of web services or APIs that can be replicated on any server (// mision).

Making this functionality available as a set of web services enables the kinds of “combinatorial” innovations that can only happen when you mash things up.  Take for example the LETSI Run-Time Web Services. From a learning perspective, the ability to create an AR app that also can be tracked in an academic or corporate LMS?  I think that’d be pretty sweet, as well as the converse: making performance support content available through Augmented or VW space.

Our total scope is very bold, but we’re starting with a practical set of services that will support location-based experiences.  The goal for our initial set of services is to accelerate development of a variety of Augmented Reality (AR) applications, collaboration tools, learning transfer mechanisms, games, and the like. When the community organizes to help us improve and extend it, we’ll do it together as the source will be shared and open.

There’s probably some questions of timetables, so let me try and address that now. We’ve locked down our initial requirements set and begin development of the web services this weekend. The plan is to have a stable public release of the web services in December (if it’s clicking along, we’ll release it sooner).

BAQON in its first incarnation

As the idea guy and the evangelist for BAQON, I’m getting ready to architect out the website (baqon.org). I need your help. What do you want to know? What would help you prepare to build a web or native mobile or desktop applications (heck, even embedded applications)? How can I connect you to the people or resources you’d need to make your application idea happen?

Please use the comments below, but obviously feel free to contact me or hit me on Twitter (@mrch0mp3rs).

I spent a decent amount of time this afternoon drafting out a chapter of the Star Wars Management Guide.  I’m hoping by having something up there for people to poke a stick at, it encourages the dozens interested in contributing to start fleshing it out some more.

To read what’s in this chapter, take a look here.

The basic structure of this chapter and any chapter written like it will look something like this:

• Background – this is situating the reader to the part of the movie in which the quote is pulled from. This is the context.
• Lesson(s) –  There must be one lesson as a takeaway from this background scenario, but there may be more than one lesson to be drawn, or the context that the lesson is addressing may be different as well.  This is the fun part, where several people have eyed up the same quote — one way you can approach it is to build out your own lessons (each); the other is to actually write collaboratively.
  • Each Lesson should have one or more Activity(ies).  These will direct the reader to the actions they must take to reinforce the learning.

You should not feel constrained to the structure I’ve put in place (okay, the Background is necessary, but this is a work that will be authored by multiple people).  In fact, I would like to ask you to take a stab at improving this first chapter so it can be a model to base the other chapters off of.

If you want to drum up support for the chapter you’re specifically interested in, by all means, blog or tweet away about it.  This effort is just as much yours as it is mine.  It’s your party.  I’m just the host.

Please use the comments and let’s get some questions out of the way!

The banquet I attended was filled to the brim with CIOs and technologists from around the Chicago area.  Thing that surprised me? The real innovators were i.c. stars themselves.  I admit I went into the banquet with no grounding or expectations.  I was invited about two days before and didn’t have a guide to situate me on what I was doing there, what the group was about, etc.  But there were a couple of takeaways I didn’t expect out of this conference:

• Culture is a process; the filter through which you see the world.
• A “Community Leader” is someone who creates sustainable opportunities for others.
• Who is witnessing your change? If you’re a tree, who is noticing your bark? Those are the people you need to keep close to you, as they’re your guides.

My first thought about some of the people attending the event were: these aren’t particularly innovative people.  I typically think of innovators along Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation curve:

Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation

Most people reading this blog are in the Innovator/Early Adopter camp.  We seem to reinforce each other (you and I).  I have a hard time considering myself an Innovator, because in my mental model of innovation, it requires Bloom’s “Synthesis” and for all the ideas I can generate, I wonder how many of them are truly original.  Maybe that’s too high a standard; we can discuss it.

To be clear, Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations Theory isn’t about making vs adopting — it’s all about adopting.  You can tell who the innovators are if they’re first.  Period; as Wikipedia defines:

Innovators are the first individuals to adopt an innovation. Innovators are willing to take risks, youngest in age, have the highest social class, have great financial lucidity, very social and have closest contact to scientific sources and interaction with other innovators.

If you and I are innovators in learning technology, chances are we have our fair share of challenges getting the buy-in.  That’s why we have our communities of practice (#lrnchat is a CoP); some of us have our quasi-secret -societies.

What was interesting to me about the i.c.stars event was more to the point of how many people are buying into how the group was innovating.  Although the attendees I met were pretty distributed in age, they met all the other qualifiers, handily (though my own financial lucidity and wealth aren’t exactly present). The i.c.stars approach at innovation is an inclusive one; very key to adoption.  There were a few attendees and volunteers in the organization that I was able to connect with (note: I wish I knew more about telecommunications for broader conversation opportunities); the graduates from the i.c. stars program had a real light inside.

Every graduate I met from the program, working as webmasters or founding interactive startups — these guys were really interesting people.  They are bringing something new to the idea landscape.  Their experiences and backgrounds are just different from the Innovators, as wikipedia defines.  I met at least four graduates of the i.c.stars program, and each one of them were the kind of person I’d want on my team to start cranking out code, content and ideas.  Why? Two reasons: a) They show up; b) They’re different from me and everyone I work with.

Each graduate had someone who pulled them into this program from an environment where their out-of-school earnings would be 25% of what they were making after leaving i.c.stars — a 4-fold difference in income changes lives and the lives that surround them.  They had to show-up every day to stay in the program (not just “attend” but be “present”), but each participant in i.c. stars has literally a community around them to support and encourage them on their journey through the program.  They have people who are appreciating their change; supporting it.

So, my brothers and sisters who are innovating for your organizations today, I want you to think about this… who’s noticing your evolution?  If you’re leading, how are you creating sustainable opportunities for the people around you?

When the desktop application for Tweetie came out, I was extremely impressed with the simplicity of the design, and when I was researching how Tweetie came about, I came across the atebits website, which was elegantly designed by Tim Van Damme.  I dug down into Tim’s site which was a business card and was really blown away with his whole aesthetic.  Clean, but not sterile — Tim’s designs offer a certain blend of sophistication and play that really appeals to me.  I signed up for Readernaut, which is the kind of social networking site for reading I’d imagined wanting to join — another plus.

The New Look

When I found out a few months ago that Tim was working on developing a lifestream-style theme for WordPress through Woo themes, I all but vowed I’d switch to it.  Once the screenshots were available, I knew I would.  And when I Logan and Evie woke me up this morning at an ungodly hour, I couldn’t fall back asleep.  Happily, I discovered in my 4am browsing that Woo Themes had finally released the Antisocial theme, and I didn’t hesitate for a second.

Harold’s thesis, to me, at its core is one of how to manage the knowledge. He’s throwing it all in the same sink, which is fine at a high level, but when you get down to it there are deeper dives. Harold’s right on the money with how to deal with the challenge; I posit that the deeper dives are where we find bigger, fundamental challenges.

“Content” is one of those closest to the surface, and it’s the most obvious way we can talk about what’s not right with our struggles with the abundance of knowledge in the world; we all have the most experience and comfort with content. The last ten years have made it faster, cheaper and easier to creating good content. Filtering content is improving, and that’s in large part because aggregating relevant content before/after filtering is solid.

As one large human network, we’ve developed better-than-primitive tools (like sticks and stones turning into hatchets) to do these things for us (there’s my shout out to @moehlert, @dennisschleiche and other cultural anthropologists).

“Content” only presents one perspective. What about “community?”

We have constructed only primitive tools when it comes to managing knowledge, in terms of our relationships with people and the communities that form out of disparate (or even conjoined) networks of people.

We’re definitely aglow with the egalitarian nature of 140-character limits because it gives us a common perspective with which to observe the merits of connecting to other people, but Twitter is still about the content at least as much as it is about the people.

Facebook can connect you to your first kiss back in Kindergarten (Holly Konopka, btw) — but Facebook can’t connect me to sociologists who happen to have experience turning big-picture visions in my head into business capabilities (as an–ahem–example). To find such a person, he/she needs to be a friend of a friend (community) or they need to have published (content) stuff that would identify them through search engines.

We have workarounds, which may eventually help us in solving this problem, but these indirect means bypass people who don’t publish much (so SEO never picks them up–BRITNEY NAKED), or are otherwise inaccessible to me because I only know academics and nerds who have no business sense (present company excluded, of course).

We have primitive means of filtering and almost no means of aggregation of people.

So even with content and community, there’s potentially still ANOTHER view of the problem with “curriculum” Harold identified, which is that in addition to not being able to handle all the content and communities that exist, we also have no way of dealing with all the “context” needed to situate an understanding, individual or communal.

I mean, we don’t even have the primitive tools for this yet. Take for example this very thread of discussion: Harold presents one point of view regarding what he sees as a root cause to a problem (I’m paraphrasing here):

“Curriculum, as a concept feels outdated… why?”

I’m now presenting a potentially more complex point of view on the issue.

There are derivatives to be drawn from even what I’m presenting to you (remove comma?) as a reader and possible participant; yet you must manage all these perspectives, including Koreen Olbrish‘s and Mark Oehlert‘s and Clark Quinn‘s perspectives on this same issue. There are some tweets on this topic, and you can throw those in the mix.

You might be reading this and have the full advantage of being situated already in this discussion with an ample handle on context. What if this post is where you first jump in? What does anyone need to do to catch up to the discussion if you want to make sense of what Harold, Koreen, Mark, Clark and now I are all talking about?

Now go a step beyond: what would someone else, other than you, need to do in order to get themselves to a point where he or she could take these ideas and run with them?

We have difficulty in making context sharable in and of itself. Because of that we have almost no way of aggregating contexts let alone filtering them. We can only imagine what that would be like. Science Fiction (or even the last ten years of online search capability) models that if we can capture things, we can make them available in lots of ways. I can recall movies like Dreamscape and Brainstorm that deal with capturing and sharing experiences, but we’re a ways away from the Matrix style of downloading that degree of context.

Besides, the hard-line transfer mechanisms are awkward or look damn uncomfortable in The Matrix.

So this brings me back to the wall Harold alludes to. I believe the scope of the problem is more dense than just that there’s so much more to “know” than we can possibly ever learn. These statements are, if you connect the same dots I’m connecting, supported by Harold himself (thanks for the link, Harold!) in “What is Weighing Down Learning“:

• There are so many more people to get to know than we can possibly ever build a relationship with;
• There are so many more experiences happening in a single day than any one of us can possibly participate in, given a lifetime!

Our notion of connecting to each other is rooted in metaphors based on connecting to content. We need to flip this on its head. So what do we do about THAT?

Well… I had an idea (// @z_rose @timpmartin).

One possible solution that some friends and I are actively working on is, at a very high level, to use the Internet itself as a giant database (rather than putting data in stovepipes like actual databases) to assign data to people, instead of digital artifacts. We think we’ve found a way to enable more complex social networking than we can currently accomplish under the conditions that networks are based solely on who you currently know and by extension through friend-of-a-friend relationships. If we get that right, we think we’ll be able to enable sharing contexts.

For future reference, we’re calling our solution a Brokered Anonymous acQuaintance Open Network, or BAQON for short.

So, now I’m thinking a bit more broadly and openly.  What if a broader community of geeks, engineers, MBAs and the like were to put together a business book based on lessons learned from Star Wars?  Call it a management guide — heck, even an instruction manual for socially awkward nerds in a non-nerd workspace.

Context

A few weeks ago, I tweeted the idea and was immediately presented with enough response to outline thirteen possible chapters (all from the original trilogy, I’d add).  I’m not the purest I once was, though I would be surprised to mine wisdom out of the prequels.  At any rate, here’s a list of the chapters suggested almost entirely from the feedback in the beginning of August:

• Chapter 1: “Stay on Target”
• Chapter 2: “Watch for Enemy Fighters”
• Chapter 3: “There Will Be No Bargain”
• Chapter 4: “I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing”
• Chapter 5: “Do or do not. There is no try.” chapter on increasing productivity?
• Chapter 6: “A Small, One-Man Fighter Should be able to Penetrate the Outer Defenses”
• Chapter 7: “These Aren’t The Droids You’re Looking For”
• Chapter 8: “Never Tell Me The Odds”
• Chapter 9: “Search Your Feelings; You Know it To Be True.”
• Chapter 10: “IT’S A TRAP!”
• Chapter 11: “What I told you was true… from a certain point of view.”
• Chapter 12: “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy”
• Chapter 13, “I Know.”

Additions…

• Chapter 14, “This deal is getting worse all the time.”
• Chapter 15, “He’s no good to me dead.”

Plan

If there is some initial interest, I’ll set up a wiki on my gen1.us domain to let a first set of writers in, and then open it up/expand.

Not that I want to force a hand in the communal/creative process, but I’m trying to put enough boundaries to help move ideas forward and eliminate distractions.  I’m completely open to doing this in different ways.

Example: if I was writing a chapter myself, I’d expect the structure to look somewhat like this:

• Title of the chapter is the pull quote.
• First section of the chapter describes the scene in which the quote takes place.
• Next section of the chapter relates it to one or more workplace scenarios where the scene in Star Wars is a metaphor (or an anti-model)
• Pepper this with citations from other literature, preferrably non-fiction experts like Covey, Collins, Pink, etc, but not exclusively non-fiction experts.  Any relevant genre to enlighten the point you’re trying to make with the quote would be fine.  Point being: I don’t want to illustrate lessons from Star Wars with lessons from Star Trek.  I’d rather use lessons from Senge than Ferengi (har har).

…but I’m also flexible on this, too.

Goals

I have very few goals I want to get out of this, for me.

1. Have fun without working too hard (*critical success factor).
2. Build relationships beyond my normal network (*big personal win here).
3. Have a site that actually has to go down for maintenance (*still nostalgic for an organic Digg effect).
4. Get it done 100% community effort (*I don’t write more than one “chapter” worth of material, if that much)

Next Steps

If you’re in, comment below.  If I get more than six comments expressing interest (from six different people), I’ll set up the wiki and we’ll go from there.

“The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users. It’s just a fact of life,” says a source at Stratcom, which is responsible for securing the military’s “global information grid.

Price Floyd, the military’s new social-networking czar, said no final decision has been made yet regarding a Web 2.0 block. “An analysis is being conducted,” Floyd told Danger Room. (Source: Milblogging)

I really don’t think “malicious code” has anything to do with this. I think the issue is much more nuanced and highly more politicized.

I’ve heard stories (I wish I could find them in the small time I have to research this) that the problem isn’t so much the blogging or microblogging by individual soldiers… most of our uniformed bloggers are following the rules. There is a set of rules, or Operations Security (OPSEC) instructions that guide what soldiers are allowed to share.

Interesting thing (at least as of 2007), these OPSEC rules are (or at least were) on the Army’s restricted knowledge base on their intranet — meaning contractors and family members would have no access to the file. Truth be told, I’m not a person who reads such rules if they don’t apply to me, and I’d guess that even given the opportunity to review the document, there’s really very little that the military can do to stop Army spouses and family members from blogging whatever they want to blog about.

So…. the story I heard is that there’s this base in the Field that was kind of an ad hoc base — a small security force to guard the base because its security was that no one knew it was there. Soldiers on the base would blog about their daily activities, being fairly mindful of their OPSEC instructions. Their spouses, being somewhat in the dark about what their soldiers were doing and where they actually were, started co-blogging to exchange information and piece together where the soliders were, what they were doing, etc. And they figured it out, which then freaked the DoD out.

With the traceability of information known to link back to the sources — the soldiers on that base — the community around them was able to aggregate and piece together some critical information intended to be kept a secret.

Now that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know how true it is, but since I haven’t seen this discussed elsewhere, it makes me at least assume it’s truthy. It’s highly contentious to point the finger at military family, which I can see why the DoD would go out of their way to not bring that into their argument for blocking social media.

It would also make sense that with this “warning order” a whole other part of the DoD, starting with Price Floyd, is looking to collect opinions on this. Because it’s a double-edged sword. The military is going to have a hard time recruiting soldiers if they can’t use the tools they want to use in communicating with friends and family abroad. We’re not writing a lot of paper-based letters anymore, where it was easy to monitor what was being said — and because it was paper-based, it was at least another step more difficult to share that information in a globally-viewable way.

I welcome any thoughts or expansions to validate or dispute this post in the comments.

To move an organizational mindset from information lockdown (“need to know”) to collaboration (“need to share”), you can probably start by evangelizing a culture of capture.

Basically, if you can “capture” information — be it a screen-capture, a screenshot, an audio capture, an mp3, a text clip, a link, a tweet, etc — you have effectively captured something that can be described (keywords, folksonomy) and then shared. It’s not a tech thing — there’s really little to nothing needed in terms of software or hardware acquisition to do this. This is quite simply boiled down to a behavior: capturing information. Sharing information can be nebulous — I think a lot of people probably look at the “need to share” idea as a great philosophy, but when push comes to shove they don’t have an idea of how to actually do “sharing.”

Perhaps the abstract of “sharing” merely needs something concrete to get it started: “capture.” Brooks Andrus (@babarakus) responded to my original tweet with the following chain, which very clearly applies the notion of “capture” in a variety of ways:

Again, I don’t know if this is an intentional contribution into our shared lexicon, but I think Masie really nails it with this quip.

Last month, two peers presented a first blush at a Blended Learning Strategy, which is a strategic thread inside a strategy, huge and reaching, built around knowledge exchange. I agree with everything they said. They get it. They explain it brilliantly. The ideas they’re coming up with are their ideas. They are passionate about blended learning approaches. I was on the teleconference, and as one manager related the shift in mindset to her personal life; as one of our ISDs gave an overview of our first blended learning approach in action as a Pecha Kucha, I was beaming with pride.

But sometimes, and this is admittedly petty, I hear their words — and they echo words I have been speaking for the last couple of years. They just never got any traction, and it’s because I was the only one talking, and I wasn’t very clear. Now there are more voices, and they’re starting to form a chorus. In order for the ideas that have been sitting in my head for years to be more than ideas, I first had to put them to paper — communicate them in a meaningful and less permeable way. Then the ideas needed to be vetted and absorbed. Utlimately, these ideas had to belong to other people — which is when action could happen. It is a long, long road to see ideas come to fruition and we are on the first step along the trail.

In order for people to own abstract concepts and make them concrete — they need to take ownership, employ their understandings. In order for an idea that your passionate about to come to life, it needs to be big enough for lots of other people to own. Because an idea worth pursuing is, as a friend just put it yesterday, bigger than all of us.

Pleased to Meet Me – The Replacements

They weren’t punk. They were alternative in a time that didn’t appreciate alternative music — they peaked just before bands like R.E.M. broke through to mainstream success. Hardcore Replacements fans (and they are passionate) will probably point to their 1985 album, Tim, and tell you it was a better album. Maybe they’re right. But the songs on this album celebrate the little guy, who despite all the promise never quite make it through to recognition and acceptance. Even now, it tugs at my angst. Combine that with lengendary tracks like “Alex Chilton,” “The Ledge” and my perrenial favorite, “Can’t Hardly Wait,” this album also gave a glimpse at where Paul Westerberg would eventually go with his solo career (think the “Singles” soundtrack if you don’t know who he is).

Loaded – The Velvet Underground

This album was already 20 years old by the time I graduated high school. I knew some people that listened to The Velvet Underground, and we all knew Walk on the Wild Side (thanks to Marky Mark… that’s a dark chapter we won’t turn back to). Again, after reading Please Kill Me, I began to really appreciate punk which was undeniably influenced by what Lou Reed did. Joy and happiness are not emotions that are normally tied to Lou Reed, but this album is very happy, from “Who Loves the Sun.” Everyone should recognize “Sweet Jane” but my favorite track that finds its way in almost every road trip is “Rock and Roll.”

The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses

Every song on this first album by The Stone Roses took dance music without going techno OR disco, and combined it with droning phased guitars to create a very unique psychedelic sound. “I Wanna Be Adored,” “Shoot You Down,” “I Am the Resurrection” are standouts, but my favorite, reinforced by Guitar Hero III, is “She Bangs the Drums.” This album dropped when in the summer of my Senior year, but I don’t remember it even catching on until college — and I didn’t come to appreciate it until much much later.

Joy Division – Substance 1977-1980

You can’t even buy this album anymore, at least not by looking for a Joy Division album (you need to look for New Order). New Order was a band I listened to, because of songs like “New Faith,” “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “Blue Monday.” But it took the movie “The Crow” with Nine Inch Nails’ cover of “Dead Souls” to turn me onto the very different band New Order was with then-lead singer Ian Curtis. These songs are dark, pulsing and beautiful. It is a compilation, and it requires some serious listening, but for me the track that captures the frenzy, the darkness and even anarchy the best is “Transmission.” DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE, DANCE TO THE RADIO indeed.

De La Soul – 3 Feet High and Rising

I listen to a lot of hip hop. My BFF, Eric, pushed me to LL Cool J and Digital Underground when we were in high school and he stopped listening to Helloween and got into Rap thanks to Tone Loc and MC Hammer. Say what you will about MC Hammer, but he got a lot of suburban kids to discover hip hop, and he’ll probably never get his due for helping blow up the community. Anyway, as my appreciation for hip hop grows deeper and wider, I keep coming back to this album and am blown away by their flow. Del the Funky Homosapien is a master, and this is their first album. My great regret is never investigating them past the radio staple “Me Myself and I.” Songs like “Jenifa Taught Me,” “Say No Go” with thump with you and make you nod your head well after the album is done, and every time I listen to the album I hear something new. This came out during a renaissance for hip hop that went beyond the I’m Badder Than You bravado of Ol’ Skool and avoided the misogyny that would pervade Gangsta.   

When Jim  posted his list on Facebook of 25 albums, I resolved that I’d respond with a list of my own, and after being called out by Brooks Andrus on Twittter, I realized that I needed to respond right now. That’s why you’re getting five, because, as you can tell, I’m taking this seriously and I want to explain my selections.

Here are 25 Albums I Love Now That I Didn’t Listen To in High School. This doesn’t include the stuff I listen to now that I caught onto in high school, so the perspective you get from this list will be a little bit skewed perhaps. Let me just say that if you’re thinking I was a Top 40 Pop/Hip Hop/Hard Rock kinda guy in high school, that’d be about right. Big fan of Phil Collins, Sting, Steve Winwood and Peter Gabriel — and Prince. Go figure. So this list is what I dig now that if I could reach out to 14-17 year-old Aaron, I’d put on the iPod that I would give to him as a gift.

In order…

The Clash – London Calling

When Suzy and I went on our honeymoon to Amsterdam after being married seven years, I put together playlists for our trip and went through my then-burgeoning library to find stuff that would entertain but open us to the new experiences, since I’d never been to Europe before. The song “Lost in a Supermarket” was suggested on an Art of the Mix playlist that came up when searching for “Amsterdam.” It turns out that it was a song Mick Jones wrote about Joe Strummer, but Suzy has maintained that when she hears this song, she always thinks of me. When you take into account all the great songs on this album, added to this one very personal song, London Calling made me wake up to the Clash starting in 2003, and I’ve kicked myself for never really giving them their due when I was young enough to have maybe seen them.

The Specials – The Specials

My brother, even in 7th grade, was a diehard fan of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Hearing the Bosstones coming out of his crappy boombox in his bedroom was my first exposure to “Ska” beyond the radio-friendly solicitations from Madness and “Our House.” I was first introduced to Bob Marley in high school but it wasn’t until my roommate Ben in my freshman year of Miami that I truly earned a love for reggae. As I grew into my own skin in college, I looked for more upbeat soundtracks to the legendary parties I threw in my sophomore year, and that is when I discovered that Fine Young Cannibals used to be General Public, who used to be The English Beat, who were on a record label called Two-Tone that produced Madness and this other band called The Specials. When I first heard this album, it instantly became an album I could play over and over again, on repeat to be the soundtrack of almost any part of any day. Not that it was that bland — it was just that necessary. “Nite Klub” has that great line I won’t dance in a club like this, all the girls look like sluts and the beer tastes just like PISS. They are telling stories throughout this album and the older I get, the more into narratives I embrace, the more resonant this album becomes.

Iron Maiden – The Number of the Beast

When I was in High School, real metal was for the metal heads and the guys who were in the smoking lounge. I was surprisingly square in that regard — I didn’t drink (at all). I didn’t smoke (anything). I was busy trying to have relationships with (and make out with) girls. If there were metal girls in my school, I would’ve listened to a lot of metal. Homestead was notorious for LSD (not the crowd I hung with), which left me with pop music. I digress. My first mentors in the E-Learning industry, Dan and Justin really schooled me on metal and influenced my development with heavy doses of Nu-Metal (Disturbed, System of a Down, Deftones, Fear Factory, etc). It really wasn’t until I worked with Kevin Reed where I started to appreciate the roots of aggression. You take a listen to “The Number of the Beast” and those mad riffs, or the galloping rhythm of “Run to the Hills” — don’t tell me you’re not moved to take on invading hordes with your bare hands! Iron Maiden makes me want to kick a 14-year-old Aaron’s scrawny lack of an ass.

The Cramps – Bad Music for Bad People

After reading Please Kill Me, I became very interested in Punk. This was, of course, like two years ago. Before then, I was mildly interested in a few songs or acts, but my appreciation for Punk and its Rockabilly offshoots really never gelled until after college. Sad and pathetic as this is, I could not have named you a Cramps track until after Lux Interior died a week ago. Listening to even this compilation of their earlier tunes, I’m mesmerized at how raw and how fresh it sounds right now. You take “Garbage Man” or “The Human Fly” or “Some New Kind of Kick” up against anyone who dares call themselves punk these days and it would kick their lilly white suburban all-star asses, collectively. The Cramps is like Iggy Pop glam, tied with southern fried rockabilly. Everyone who loves rock & roll should love this band.

Judas Priest – Defenders of the Faith

Any album called out by Tipper Gore back in the day should have deserved my attention. The riffs on pretty much every track on this album are sickly good. If Iron Maiden was pure metal, then this is the album that in hindsight took metal’s values to a wider audience. Rob Halford makes metal sexy, and songs like “Jawbreaker” still make me bang the head, even lacking the length of hair to do so legitimately. This album has slower songs, but you could never call them power ballads. Ever.

LETSI

The organization that would seek to build upon SCORM into a 2.0 state that meets the needs of distributed learning today and tomorrow has a new site up: https://www.letsi.org/ . You’ll still be able to look to any number of blogs that talk about our various activities, but this site is poised to be the definitive (and user-friendly) source of information about our activities, including what’s happening with “SCORM 2.0″ — put in quotes because, quite frankly, it just might not even be called SCORM anymore for a variety of reasons that have been discussed (and will continue to be discussed) elsewhere. My involvement has grown beyond that of just a contributor of mindshare to the effort. I’m now, for intents and purposes, heading up the LETSI blog, which will feature several members of LETSI and the greater community. From here on in, if I’m blogging about SCORM or LETSI on this site, it will be largely in the context of my personal opinion (not a big stretch), or a technical explanation that is relevant to SCORM as it is today (2004 or 1.2) which would be not as relevant on the LETSI blog.

Avron Barr started the blog off with an excellent post, “What Are We Saying to Each Other?“

Work

Around the middle of December, a new leader was brought into my area who is changing the dynamic of my organization; in my humble opinion, it’s quite for the better. About four weeks ago, he asked for my input on how I see formal instruction and knowledge management in light of each other, and what resulted was a (still growing) 30+ page white paper addressing the relationships among formal instruction, knowledge management and collaboration for our enterprise — going forward over the next 10-11 years. I had quite a bit of help organizing my thoughts and ramblings from several of my coworkers and peers. I will share pieces of it here on the blog in coming posts, but in this post I’ll just say that to some surprise it’s now the foundation we will build several strategic threads from. Rather than just languish as the techie/fix-it guy around the department, I’m now helping to coordinate these strategic threads, each with their own project teams, milestones, etc… Many will be working in an agile way, which is a significant shift from only following an ADDIE model for learning content — we’re going much bigger, much faster, and much more aggressive.

I like it a lot.

The downturn in the economy is opening up the possibilities for trying out new ideas in small lab settings — which is a huge win. In one example, one of my colleagues is moving forward with reinforcing focus and memory skills for our pickers in our Distribution Centers. We’ve been doing an instructor-led program that has proven to work for a couple of years now. This year? With one group, we’re going to buy Nintendo DSs and the Flash Focus game. They wanted to make the instructional exercises available online, and they wanted me to build it. Being lazy, I suggested they buy them DSs and the game — which altogether would be a lot faster to implement and cheaper to execute and maintain than for me to build it in Flash. Funny thing when you can innovate on the cheap — right now people are interested in giving it a shot.

I’d like to use it as an opportunity to actually study the impact of a game, when we can compare it to the ILT, and the audience we’re delivering to is heavy on metrics. If you have an idea on what we should be measuring, please respond in the comments!

Bottom line — between LETSI and work, things are going well and there’s a lot of activity going.

Business

I’d like not to blame the economy, but I was insanely busy with my little consulting shop towards the end of last year — so successful that I shrewdly bought a block of advertising on LinkedIn and Google AdWords to help deal with the possible downturn. Well… that was $123 not well-spent. I got no business from it at all. I hardly got a bump in traffic. I’ve been slow going for sidework of any type. Maybe it’s the time of year for E-Learning work… who knows? By posting this, it’s possible things start to pick up. I’m not stressing over it — I definitely have enough to keep me honest

The wonderful news is that I’m slated to speak at both the Innovations in Learning conference hosted by the DAU at George Mason University, and I’m also slated to speak at the ADL AcademicFest at UW-Madison (REPRESENT, MAD-TOWN!!!!). I love these opportunities to hang out with big brains, swap ideas, drink — I’m looking forward to these events quite a bit.

I’m almost positive I’ll be attending both the Masie Semi-Annual Gathering and the Learning Systems 2009 Conference, both back to back in Chicago. I’ll also likely attend the WordCamp Chicago in June, too.

Blog

The next couple of posts will be about the work I’ve done with Knowledge Management and Collaboration. The very next one will give you some context on what drove my thinking and what’s resulted from sharing those thoughts — this is important because like any creation worthy of sharing, the how is as important as the what. After that, I’ll share the highlight reel on the strategy — at least the parts I feel comfortable sharing for public consumption, which will likely use Creative Commons so there’s no misunderstandings.

Twitter

I had a small exchange via Twitter with “Meet the Press” host David Gregory (@davidgregory) last week, and since then the number of followers has exploded! I’ve been privy to some great exchanges in the past week and it has dominated my iPhone time that could be spent on Zombieville, USA.

Breakdown of the interface for the browser.swf

UPDATED:  Download the project files here: browser.zip

XML-Driven iTunes-like Browser in ActionScript 3 by Aaron Silvers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.aaronsilvers.com.

So, I’ve scripted me up an application with two listboxes, working off of one set of XML data exported (as previously detailed) from MS Access.

Now for the explanations…

import flash.geom.ColorTransform;

In order to dynamically change the color of a movieclip, you need to bring in the ColorTransform class. I use this to change the background_mc shown in the diagram above — I want to change the color to indicate if the resource being presented is currently available, or available when there’s a big enough pool to demand a course as instructor led training.

var xmlLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
var xmlData:XML = new XML();
xmlLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, LoadXML );
 
xmlLoader.load( new URLRequest( "resources.xml" ) );

With AS3, you can’t just call getURL anymore. It’s deprecated. So, you need to create an instance of the URLLoader class and use its internal method of load to bring it in. The nice thing about these events is that Flash’s Run-Time can detect when you’ve actually completely loaded the URLRequest — which is why the addEventListener above calls on my function/method LoadXML when the loading event is complete.

var MasterArray:Array = [];
var TopLevelArray:Array = [];
var TempSecondLevelArray:Array = [];
var TopIndexLength:Number;
var TempSecondIndexLength:Number;

I’m manipulating the XML in a couple of different ways. I have a hunch that Flash handles its own array data a lot faster than it manipulates XML, even when it’s internalized. That’s the way it used to be, and that’s just what guides my decision making, so I’m going to use MasterArray to do a direct capture of the XML data as an Array inside of Flash, and then use the TopLevelArray and the TempSecondLevelArray to help me maintain just the information I need to populate those two listboxes, respectively.

// Hide the Launch button by default
availability_mc.launch_btn.visible = 0;
 
function LoadXML( e:Event ):void
{
	xmlData = new XML( e.target.data );
	ParseData( xmlData );
}

The LoadXML method uses the data from the Event object and references it as an XML object, which is then used by my ParseData method, below…

function ParseData( newXML:XML ):void
{
var newList:XMLList = newXML.resources;
 
// Populate the MasterArray so we don't have to keep manipulating a huge honking XML file
for each (var newItem:XML in newList)
{
	MasterArray.push( {
			 learningRoadmapId:newItem.learningRoadmapId,
			 cardinality:newItem.cardinality,
			 resourceId:newItem.resourceId,
			 availabilityId:newItem.availabilityId,
			 availabilityStatus:newItem.availabilityStatus,
			 tCategories_name:newItem.tCategories_name,
			 tTracks_name:newItem.tTracks_name,
			 tTypes_name:newItem.tTypes_name,
			 tResources_name:newItem.tResources_name,
			 description:newItem.description,
			 link:newItem.link
			 } );
}

…just to interject, I’m creating an Object for each node of the XML data and making each Object an element of the MasterArray. Everywhere above where it says newItem, I’m pulling a node from the xml file (so newItem.resourceId means I’m pulling the resourceId value exported from the MS Access database for the current record. The for each allows me to loop through this series of actions as many times as there are records in the xml file I’m reading. Moving on…

// Now populate an array of just the top-level Learning Map IDs, so that it's easier to sort
for ( var i:Number = 0; i < MasterArray.length; i++ )
{
	TopIndexLength = TopLevelArray.length;
	if( TopIndexLength == 0 ) TopLevelArray.push( {label:MasterArray[i].learningRoadmapId, data:MasterArray[i].learningRoadmapId} );
	if( TopIndexLength >= 1 )
	{
		var now = MasterArray[i];
		var lastIdentified = TopLevelArray[ TopIndexLength - 1 ];
		if ( now.learningRoadmapId != lastIdentified.label ) TopLevelArray.push( {label:MasterArray[i].learningRoadmapId, data:MasterArray[i].learningRoadmapId} );
	}
}

The “Top” Listbox is only to list out all the learning maps in the database. Even though I’ve stored everything as a resource in my previous posts so they are flat in the database, I’m customizing a view to reflect the real-world hierarchy, which I can do because I’ve categorized my information in the database such that I can easily identify what type of resource any one resource is.

//Now populate the top-level listbox
for ( var j:Number = 0; j < TopIndexLength; j++ )
{
	top_lst.addItem( TopLevelArray[j] );
}
}

Bam. That wasn’t so difficult, right? Next up? What do we do when someone selects a LearningMap from the “Top” listbox?

top_lst.addEventListener(Event.CHANGE, topItemChange);
 
function topItemChange( e:Event ):void
{
	// Remove every item out of the second-level listbox
	middle_lst.removeAll();
 
	// Reset the length of the second-level array
	TempSecondLevelArray = [];
 
	// Sort through the MasterArray for any resources that have the selected
	// Learning Map as its parent.
	var selectedLearningMap:String = top_lst.selectedItem.data;
 
	for ( var i:Number = 0; i < MasterArray.length; i++ )
	{
		if( MasterArray[i].learningRoadmapId == selectedLearningMap )
		{
			TempSecondLevelArray.push( {label:MasterArray[i].resourceId, data:MasterArray[i]} );
			TempSecondIndexLength = TempSecondLevelArray.length;
		}
	}
 
	// Now populate the middle listbox (currently only the label and description)
	for each ( var ResourceItem in TempSecondLevelArray )
	{
		middle_lst.addItem( ResourceItem );
	}
 
}

The commments above should be pretty self-explanatory. We need to wipe out anything that’s in that “Middle” listbox and repopulate it based on what is currently selected in the “Top” listbox.

middle_lst.addEventListener(Event.CHANGE, middleItemChange);
 
function middleItemChange( e:Event ):void
{
	// Populate the textfield with formatted text
	var myText = middle_lst.selectedItem.data.description;
	pane_txt.htmlText = myText;
 
	// Hide the Launch button by default
	availability_mc.launch_btn.visible = 0;
 
	// Show the availability of the selected resource
	availability_mc.label_txt.text = middle_lst.selectedItem.data.availabilityStatus;
 
	// Change the color of the availability status bar based on the status of the resource
	var avStatus = middle_lst.selectedItem.data.availabilityId;
 
	var newColorTransform:ColorTransform = availability_mc.background_mc.transform.colorTransform;
 
	// If the resource is "available"
	if ( avStatus == "1" )
	{
		newColorTransform.color = 0xFF0000;
		availability_mc.background_mc.transform.colorTransform = newColorTransform;
	}
	// If the resource is "on demand"
	else if( avStatus == "3" )
	{
		newColorTransform.color = 0xF69200;
		availability_mc.background_mc.transform.colorTransform = newColorTransform;
	}
 
	// Show a button to launch the resource if a link is provided
	if ( middle_lst.selectedItem.data.link != "0" )
	{
		availability_mc.launch_btn.visible = 1;
		availability_mc.launch_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, button_function );
		function button_function( evt:MouseEvent )
		{
			var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest( middle_lst.selectedItem.data.link );
			try
			{
				navigateToURL(request, '_blank'); // second argument is target
			}
			catch (e:Error)
			{
  				trace("Error occurred!");
			}
		}
	}
}

So, in the previous post, I went through a bit of my rationale behind the architecture I came up with for the database, and how it models the way in which my organization is looking at career learning mapping. With all that data organized in Microsoft Access, everyone with the software in the organization can maintain the database if they understood what I put in the last post. But to use the data in the little Flash browser I built (and you can build after my next post), we still need to spit that data out in a format that makes sense. Flash can’t read an Access database directly (not without some help), but Flash can read XML just fine, and we can export XML from Microsoft Access.

Now, we could do an entire data dump of the database to XML, but that file would be very difficult to work with. By running a query and exporting the results of a query to XML, we can have a little more control over the output (Access doesn’t give you any options for how to format the XML), and when the XML is easier to work with, you’ll have a much easier time building an application to work with it.

So the first thing we need to do is figure out how we want to eventually use this data. The way I envisioned an employee browsing for information about a learning map was like using the browser in iTunes…

Going from left-to-right along the three lists, you can browse iTunes first by selecting a Genre, which then filters the list of Artists down to the artists that qualify in that Genre. When you select the artist you want, you can additionally filter down to the Album you’re most interested in by that artist and go on to select a song from that album. Using the iTunes browser, I can manage my own library of 23,907 songs (66.3 days of music) and find what I want in seconds.

Our learning maps are organized similarly, but the total population is not nearly as large (currently only 300 or so resources) organized into only about 8 defined learning maps. Our browsing dig-down (at the moment) really only needs to go from Learning Map -> Course ID -> Descriptive information. Because of the way we’ve structured the database, we can actually support far more robust searches if we needed them, but it’s admittedly overkill to build extensive search features for a population of data that’s so tiny.

Nevertheless, the query we need to put together to pull information that will format nicely to this (that Access will just natively kick out so a guy like me isn’t always stuck maintaining either the database or the Flash application) is pretty significant.

SELECT tAggregations.learningRoadmapId, tAggregations.cardinality, tAggregations.resourceId,
tAggregations.trackId, tAvailability.availabilityId, tAvailability.availabilityStatus,
tCategories.name AS tCategories_name, tResources.name AS tResources_name, tResources.description, tResources.link,
tTracks.name AS tTracks_name, tTypes.name AS tTypes_name

FROM (tTypes INNER JOIN (tCategories INNER JOIN (tAvailability INNER JOIN tResources ONtAvailability.availabilityId = tResources.availabilityId) ON tCategories.categoryId = tResources.categoryId)ON tTypes.typeId = tResources.typeId) INNER JOIN (tTracks INNER JOIN tAggregations ONtTracks.trackId = tAggregations.trackId) ON tResources.resourceId = tAggregations.resourceId

ORDER BY tAggregations.learningRoadmapId, tAggregations.cardinality, tAggregations.resourceId;

Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to write Inner Joins or SQL-style query language in order to pull good information out of the database. Access, for what it is, does it pretty much all for you.

In Design mode, you can define your relationships like this (note how this looks exactly the same as the relationships in my previous post):

Once you’ve established the relationships, you can then simply select the fields you want a report on based on how some of the fields are related to each other (these are those INNER JOIN statements written in SQL — for example, I JOIN the Tracks table to the Aggregations table where the field trackId in both tables are the same.

When you run this query, you’ll get a whole report based on the data you already entered in the database and the way your Query describes it to be produced. This query can then be exported out of Access directly as XML, and the structure of this particular query will output data that looks like the following:

<resources>

<learningRoadmapId>LM-SAMPLE</learningRoadmapId>

<cardinality>0</cardinality>

<resourceId>EMT500</resourceId>

<trackId>4</trackId>

<availabilityId>1</availabilityId>

<availabilityStatus>Currently available.</availabilityStatus>

<tCategories_name>Compliance</tCategories_name>

<tResources_name>Business Conduct Guidelines for Monkeys</tResources_name>

<description />

<link>http://sizzler.com/</link>

<tTracks_name>Onboarding</tTracks_name>

<tTypes_name>Course</tTypes_name>

In December, I was presented with a knowledge management problem for my real job as an internal consultant. Like many large organizations, we have some curricula established for career advancement, but this information is scattered all over the company intranet, which is usually littered with a lot of irrelevant or outdated materials. I was asked to come up with a way for our employees to easily find out what courses they need to register for in the LMS in the learning map they wish to follow — and to have this information available for a number of learning maps in one location.

Modeling in Microsoft Access

The old way of organizing learning maps for our employees was for one HR employee to update a bunch of separate powerpoint decks, one tied to each learning map. They were formatted similarly, but the first thing I thought about was coming up with a model to fit each learning map in so they were using the same taxonomy (category names and labels) and the same structure.

The powerpoint decks illustrated learning maps that at a high level look like this:

1. There are a bunch of courses lumped together in a couple of high level categories, which I decided to call “Tracks.” The reason for calling them “Tracks” is because each of the courses also had their own category — some are product courses, some are compliance courses, some are technology courses, etc. A Track might pull on courses from multiple categories. That implied some kind of distinction, if not some kind of hierarchy — and that different way of looking at a collection of courses an employee might need to take meant that I needed to have separate ways (at least two) of organizing these courses in one learning map.
2. There are several learning maps that I have documentation for (who knows how many might be out there that I don’t know about). Each learning map could potentially pull some of the same courses, so that also implied a need to have yet another, abstracted way of organizing courses separate from the learning maps.
3. In some of the powerpoint decks, there were internal links being referenced and aggregated in some of the tracks. Some tracks even pulled in another learning map! To me, this implied that they type of resource had to be distinct from the resource itself, because sometimes a course is part of a learning map. Sometimes a course may be aggregated with a learning map. And a learning map might consist of a collection of courses, links and learning maps.

Confused? Hopefully not. After stewing over a couple of these decks, I very quickly came up with a relational database structure that looks exactly like this:

Here’s how it actually plays out. In slides 2, 8, 14, 21 and 28 in the above (almost unreadable) slide deck, you see a bunch of a boxes in columns. Each column potentially represents a category, but the aggregation of columns on a single slide represents a track. Once I could discern a repeatable logic from this model and found it applicable to the other powerpoint decks, the rest of the database came easy.

You notice in that high level view of the slide deck the three different colors (red, blue and that mustard)? Each color represents the availability of the given resource. Red represented content that was already available through the LMS. Mustard represented content that could be reserved, and blue represented content that was not available at the moment. This indicated to me that I needed to provide some way for people to know the availability of a given piece of content.

Each resource has a name, a type (intranet link or web course or learning map), an availability status, a link associated with it to launch the resource and some description information. All this information should stay consistent about the resource no matter what other aggregation, or collection of resources, the one may be part of later on. This way, if this particular resource needs to change (say it’s a course like Business Conduct Guidelines for Mammals), we only change the information in this one listing, and the change is absorbed in every instance of the resource.

Notice in the relationships diagram inside of Microsoft Access (shown above), the tables for Categories, Availability and Types are abstracted from the Resources? I did that because somewhere along the line I may have a need to add or combine how I categorize my resources. Perhaps I’ll have more types of resources to work with later on (virtual rooms, might be a new resource in the future). I may need tiers of availability status instead of just the available, on request or not available. In any of these cases, these are things that apply to all resources, potentially — I don’t want to make a change to one of these on potentially hundreds or thousands of entries. So we associate each label in these tables with its own identifier, and use that identifier in the Resources table.

Now the Tracks table works the same way — I have a numeric identifier that’s a primary key and I have a label associated with it. Why did I not include the Track with a resource like I did the Category? Well, a couple of reasons. First, there was a hierarchy implied (as I wrote about earlier), so I know that Tracks are higher up the chain of taxonomy than Categories. Secondly, I know that I can have multiple types of Resources, and potentially a Resource like a course for Social Skills for Muppets might be part of some kind of Soft Skills Track in one curriculum or learning map, but it might be part of a Management track in a different learning map. This assumption adds no real extra work if it turns out that a course is always used in the same Track universally, but it saves a lot of work in maintenance if the assumption proves correct as our curriculum mapping builds.

But this means we need to associate a Resource with a Track in yet another table — the Aggregations table. In this one table, I put together every learning map, because learning maps are how we’re aggregating our resources in the context of tracks. So each row in the Aggregations table has it’s own numeric identifier, or primary key, the identifier for a LearningRoadmapId which is tied to a resourceId from the Resources table (remember that Resources, as I defined them could be Learning Maps themselves); this means I’m using “LearningRoadmapId” as a parent identifier in the same table. I have another field listing the individual resource I’m mapping to the parent resource, and that maps again, to a ResourceId in the Resources table; this represents the actual child in how a resource might be part of another resource. That specific resource’s trackId is provided from the Tracks table. And, we ever need to specify an order to how learners should experience these resources, I put in an extra field for cardinality which would allow me to custom sort by LearningRoadmapId and then by cardinality.

My next posts will be on Making the Data Available to Flash and Manipulating XML Data in Flash.

Melissa Pierce, tagged me in a rotating blog meme that states I need to outline 7 random/odd things about me. I’d just like to state for the record that it is incredibly difficult to come up with new and original random/odd facts about me when I’ve already listed out so many here. Having posted that, the following fulfills my obligation to the meme deities…

1. Apparently, I snore insanely and irritatingly loud.
2. Everything I know about how to relate to people (and, in a similar vein, acting) I learned from participating in ComedySportz starting in my sophomore year of high school. Prior to that, I had a very difficult time making friends and small talk. Not that I’m a genius now, but you can only imagine how bad I used to be. ComedySportz sparked a love of performing so much that if I had the financial means to not work for a couple of years, I would enroll in Second City and pursue being a sketch comedian.
3. Logan is named after Wolverine. Her sister, Evie, was not named after the heroine in V for Vendetta, but I’ll run with it because it backs up my geek cred.
4. I taught myself Flash before I learned one lick of HTML and JavaScript.
5. I cry at movies like all the damn time. I’m a sucker for melodrama. I hate myself for doing it; recognize I’m doing it when I’m doing it but I can’t stop myself.
6. Guitar Hero aside, I really suck at video games. Almost as much as I suck at physical competition.
7. I have a tattoo of the Rebel Alliance symbol on my right shoulder. What most people don’t know is that it ALMOST was the logo for Van Halen. Suzy put her foot down on that idea, and we are both much happier because of it.

I tag:

• Brian Dusablon
• Will Hare
• Kevin Reed
• Elliot Cobb
• Jim Behymer
• Scott Davis
• Judy Coposky

The Rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

A friend emailed me this morning asking how I go about blogging as a Mac user, and how I manage the buzz between Twitter and Facebook.

My workflow for blogging uses these tools, not necessarily all together:

1. WordPress
2. MarsEdit
3. WordPress for iPhone
4. ScribeFire (for Firefox)

WordPress is the web application running on PHP/MySQL that I use to actually host the blog. I self-host my sites, but there are a lot of people that use WordPress.com to host their blogs. Regardless, it’s exactly the same engine. It’s a) free and open-source software; b) elegant and beautifully designed for users to spend more time writing and less time maintaining; c) boasting a huge community of theme designers and plugin authors that morph the blogging tool into a full fledged CMS, CRM and even a social network (if they’re using the WordPress Multi-User Server — also free). WordPress even supports Google Gears, so you can use it to author offline and then sync up when you’re connected again. It is my primary authoring tool.

MarsEdit is a plain-text editor for blogging. It works with Blogger, MovableType (and its hosted solution, TypePad) and WordPress among a few others. I bought it a while ago and honestly, I don’t use it as much as I used to since WordPress’ own authoring functions have matured so much, but now and again I use it to write really long and involved posts that will need to contain a lot of media that I need to create to illustrate a point.

I infrequently blog little missives from the iPhone (though a lot less of that now that I have found my outlet with Twitter). When I do, I use WordPress for iPhone and I can take pictures and post to the blog from the app. The next version is important and I’ll use it more often, as I’ll be able to moderate and respond to comments on my blogs — and the app supports multiple WordPress blogs (either self-hosted or on WordPress.com). There’s a possibility that the next version of the app will allow you to pretty much completely admin the blogs, and that would be pretty huge for me now that I can install themes and plugins from my own site.

Now, the tool I probably use most when I’m at work is ScribeFire , which is a plugin for Firefox. If Firefox is your browser of choice, it’s a great plugin and has some nice shortcuts like creating links with the url you’ve already copied onto your clipboard when you want to create a link. Firefox works dog slow on my Mac and it’s a drain even on my PC, so I waver on using it a lot, but if you’re using Firefox, you can’t beat the price

Now as far as Twitter/Facebook updates — Tom King and Mark Oehlert have wavered a bit on linking the two together, but the common way of doing it is to post to Twitter and it relays original tweets (not @ replies or d messages) to your Facebook status. There’s a Facebook app to accomplish this and that’s what I do . Tom and Mark argue, and have a valid point, that the two are distinct audiences and the Facebook crowd often gets left out of the context with which you’d post to Twitter. I try to write for both, and let the chips fall where they may in Facebook — most of my Facebook contacts are non-geeks and they’re overwhelmed with the amount of status updates I have — they think I’m always on Facebook.

I have not tried Pinger. I’ve been using Fring… but PInger looks a lot prettier. Fring supports skype, though, which is pretty nifty if you have WiFi on you can even call over Skype, which is pretty cool.

For monitoring the buzz, especially on Twitter, I use Tweetie. I’ll check out Pinger, but I have some trouble with filtering when everything is in one big clump, like it is with Fring. Tweetie is fast and convenient, and the Facebook app for iPhone is pretty good at being able to respond now to most posts or comments I receive — I set up SMS alerts for wall updates and comments in Facebook, since I have unlimited SMS. Which is important when people are making that timely and mission critical comment on my picture of my Mii and my Wii code. It’s crunch times like that when I can’t reply fast enough.

I’ve also set up a Google alert for @mrch0mp3rs, which lets me know once a day where I get cited (even outside of Twitter, which I do and has happened to me).

After replying the above advice to my friend, Tom followed up recommending ecto, which I’m using to write this post and I have to say, I’m REALLY impressed. I may do a lot more blogging with ecto. Tom also recommends iBlogger over WordPress for iPhone, and since Illuminex makes both ecto AND iBlogger, I’ll have to give it a try, too.

The thing about being a geek, is that you can never REALLY cement your workflow. It’s constantly in Beta.

1. Why am I good at keeping friends but bad at starting businesses with partners? I’ve been married for over twelve years and we still love each other.   I’ve moved several times across the country with my expanding family and I’ve been able to hold onto friends from everywhere I’ve lived and worked.   We talk/IM/email/tweet almost every day.   I’m even finding friends from the long long ago when there was no Internet to speak of.   I’m an a**hole, but the evidence clearly demonstrates that I’m the kind of a**hole that has a lot of real friends with high tolerances for a**holes.   That said, two times now, I’ve tried to start a business venture with former co-workers (who were also friends), and it hasn’t worked out.   The first time was like six years ago, and the chips were stacked against us with everyone physically moving so far away from each other, and I went passive aggressive in trying to deal with the frustration (mea culpa).   I thought I learned from that experience, but I guess there’s something more for me to learn as my new consulting business went from a partnership to a solo effort barely a month after launching.   So in 2009 I’ll continue to be a company of one.   I still love the idea of partnering in business — maybe not with former co-workers?   It seems to fly contrary to logic…
2. What the hell happened with Rhymefest’s second album, “El Che?” It was supposed to drop in April of 2008.   The Michael Jackson tribute “Man in the Mirror” was so fantastic, I was really looking forward to it — and the album never came out with no news (not even news on MySpace) as to why it was delayed.
3. Why is so much E-Learning content done in Flash if there’s no Flash “coolness” going on? Don’t get me wrong, the more maintenance on your old courses are chores and pain spots, the more sidework I’m going to get updating it and converting it to SCORM or AICC — but if a page-turner is a page-turner, there’s a lot of easier (and cheaper) ways of creating E-Learning content than putting it all in Flash.   This is a topic I hope to explore with Learning Ninjas in 2009 (more to come on that).
4. Why is growing old so painful? Seriously, this tendonitis I have?   Everytime there’s precipitation this last month (and there’s been a lot), my left leg/foot and back hurt like hell.   I could accept it, I guess, if I was some kind of athlete with a storied career that was hard on my joints or whatever — but I’m a nerd whose joints for the most part have been mostly guarded from anything that might cause them stress or harm.
5. How many life and career coaches does the Internet need? It seems like I get followed each week by a new career coach (on Twitter).   Some punk just out of college is going to coach me on my career?   Really?   Try having a career (or 3) first before imparting me with all the wisdom from your BA in English (note:   not ranking on English majors — I’m married to one).   I know of one career coach who’s doing “something” (that’s you, @melissapierce) and she’s not even trying to coach me.

Technorati Tags: twitter, life coach, career coach, tendonitis, pain, growing older, e-learning, flash, page-turner, scorm, aicc, learning ninas, consulting, sidework, business, partnering, partnerships, friends, relationships, rant, opinion, 2008, 2009

I’m about five months into my mobile bliss, and I figured I’d share what I’m using the most.

Screen 1

• Google
• Remember the Milk
• Recorder
• Evernote
• Twittelator Pro
• Amazon.com

Screen 2

• iBlueSky
• Bloomberg
• i.TV
• Constitution
• Light
• TouchTerm
• NetShare
• Wikipanion
• Annotater
• Easy Wi-Fi
• Shakespeare

Screen 3

• AirSharing
• Google Earth
• Facebook
• WordPress
• LinkedIn
• fring
• Shazam
• Bookbag
• Sportacular
• Yelp
• Yammer
• Last.fm
• Joost

Screen 4

• Spore
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
• Tatomic Lite
• Comic Touch
• Sketches
• Pandora
• Ocarina
• miniSynth
• Guitarist
• Magic 8 Ball
• More Cowbell
• RjDj Single
• Cube
• Trace

Screen 5

• ColorsLite
• TellTime LITE
• Crash Kart

Apps I bought but am not using:

• Flickup
• Steps
• Todo

Apps I downloaded but am not using:

• Barcode
• DigiDrummer Lite
• Earthscape
• iChoose
• Internet RadioBOX
• Mocha VNC Lite
• Obama ’08
• Stanza
• Tris
• Urbanspoon

First, an overarching requirement:   no matter what the technology, be it building an application for the iPhone or creating some content for your Learning Management System — everyone involved with the project needs to have familiarity with the tools and technologies involved.   This may seem obvious, but I’m constantly hit with project opportunities that I walk away from where the actors involved don’t really know anything about the medium they’re building to.   It’s not just the developers that need to know the tech — if you’re building E-Learning, your project managers and clients need to have some solid experience taking E-Learning for themselves so they know what they’re going to be either working toward, or what they’re looking to avoid.

If you have a team that knows the medium it’s going to play in, here are some attributes that Apple seems to share about what constitutes a great application:

Great Apps are…

• Delightful
• Innovative
• Designed Well
• Integrated
• Optimized
• Connected
• Localized.

Delightful

Above and beyond anything else, a great application is delightful.   This means it’s inviting (the app itself compells you to want to use it), intuitive (does exactly what you expect it to do), engaging (keeps you occupied and involved), exciting (provides a thrill) and enabling (lets you do things that you never could do before).

If you’re looking at the iPhone for examples of truly delightful apps, check out Guitarist, Yelp and Facebook.   Guitarist is just a thrill to use and having used it on the advice of the workshop I attended, I can tell you with only three hours of playing with it that I can’t believe I went this whole time without it.   It’s an amazing application.

Yelp enables you to do things with the web service that people never could do with the website (easily).   The site is used more effectively because its content is now on the iPhone, when you actually need its information.   This is an app I also added on the suggestion from this workshop.

I’ve used Facebook from the beginning, but admittedly in the 2.0 version of the iPhone app, it enables me to use Facebook more frequently and consistently than I ever did as a website that was blocked by my corporate firewall and handicapped as a mobile site.

Innovative

Innovative applications are revolutionary, inspirational and fresh.   They turn things on the ear and add an admittedly geek sense of wonder to them.   Classics, as an example, is a book reader.   There are a few book readers on the iPhone.   What Andrwe Kazmierski and Phill Ryu did that sets Classics apart from the other book readres is *how* they approached book reading on the iPhone.   They worked with a CGI expert to perfect the page flip in their book reader as well as an “actual” bookmark to save your spot in your book.   Books even fly on and off the bookshelf as you put them away or pick them up.

Shazam revolutionized how to figure out what you’re listening to.   Example:   the night the Cubs lost the NLCS, I was in an Irish pub and a song came on that sounded like a funny rip off of Prince.   I whipped out the iPhone and used Shazam and it told me it was “Debra” by Beck.   I thought, “A Ha!   This has got to be wrong.   There’s no way this is a Beck song.”   I tagged it with Shazam about five times, each time it came up with “Debra.”   When I got back home I checked it out on iTunes and sure enough, the software nailed it.   Even in an exceedingly loud and crowded bar, it picked out this song.   That’s insane to me.   But if I needed that song for the cab ride, not only did Shazam identify the song correctly, it linked in the iTunes store where I could buy it for my ride home.   It’s innovative because it solves a common problem with a very unique experience.

Designed Well

Great design is not an accident.   It is a top priority and it is supported in every phase of a project — it doesn’t just end with the “design” phase.   Great design comes from small teams, not large embedded factions (and not individuals).   Small teams tend to be inter-disciplinary and more organic.   They also tend to be easier to manage and because of the size they communicate well and make decisions quickly.   Teams that can flex themselves around the needs of a project also tend to iterate quickly, too.

I saw aggregated numbers from several leading application development groups, and the amount of time they spent in different phases of a project were pretty striking for how closely aligned they were:

• 33% of project time was devoted to the Design.
• 25% of project time was devoted to the Code.
• 21% of project time for Debugging.
• 21% of project time for Testing.

Even in Code, Debugging and Testing — Design permeates and surrounds those phases.   Great design focuses on solutions, not features.   The phrase stressed here is that great design comes from saying NO to a thousand different things.

The examples that were shared on designing well are more anecdotal.   Twitterrific Pro was an App Store launch application, but it was one of the last applications to go in for the cut.   They waited until they had the design just right.   For instance, they were pretty much “done” until some realized that people are probably going to tweet one-handed — and they wanted to make sure they put in handedness optimization before the initial launch of the app.   They focused not on a “feature” but on a “solution” — and that dictated when the app was ready to go.

Tap Tap has an app called “Where To” and when it launched, it looked like your basic list-style application where you dig down to get to the information you want.   Because Tap Tap is a very small team, they were able to transform teh itnerface quickly going from the basic list-style interface to a rotary dial interface that saved real estate, eliminated the need to scroll — and they were able to get it out FAST.

Another example of great design? Colors! by Jens Andersson — the color wheel selection is brilliant and takes advantage of the how people interface with the iPhone.

Integrated

Integrated applications take advantage of all the technologies and data in a system.   Imagine building information portals instead of just your static E-Learning content.   What would it mean to learners to have E-Learning that included real-time data — or where their performance in a multimedia experience directly unlocked new functions in a business system?   In the case of the iPhone, there’s an entire Software Development Kit (SDK) that gives a development team access to the very same tools and resources that Apple uses to build apps for the iPhone themselves.

Some excellent examples of integrated applications include the MIM1.0, which is a tool that oncologists can use to do bedside consultations with cancer patients — which makes it easier and more personal to consult patients rather than making them wheel up to giant and expensive workstations.   The tool uses the native photo manipulation and multi-touch to dig down and laterally through a variety of visual information.

Another, more accessible, example is the Crash Bandicoot game — which has 12 super hi-rez race tracks and awesome integration with the iPhone’s graphics and accelerometer.   Recently released, there’s Google Earth which integrates with the accelerometer, the multi-touch display to rotate the Eartch and uses the GPS built in for a truly incredible tool for looking at where you are.

Optimized

No one wants to use an application that doesn’t perform well.   You can’t have a delightful application if it’s not responsive.   You need to care about performance optimization, so it has to be a priority throughout the development cycle.   This involves analysis (checking for memory leaks, as one example).   This involves testing — testing that leads to some tough stances, like rejecting code taht degrates performance before committing it into your code repository.   EVERYONE on your team needs to appreciate that high performance is a high priority.   Testing involves benchmarking — so you can keep track of how well your project is performing as it’s being built.

Code re-use is clearly intelligent, but we all know that even when code gets reused, it needs to be tweaked.   This is why you can’t just blindly port old code into your application wholesale.   This is true for Flash; this is true for Objective-C.   You can’t just blindly move your entire feature set, adjust/update the syntax and wipe your hands of the code.

Based on the examples, it’s clear that in the App Store, no one demonstrates this better than Pangea Software.   Enigmo, Nonsaur and Cro-Mag Rally are all Macintosh games — some of them have been around for years.   They were written with OpenGL for graphics and were based in C.   When it came time to build them for the iPhone, they were able to get Enigmo running on the iPhone in the first 48 hours — by running, I mean it *worked.*   That was only 5% of their development time.   The other 95% of their development time was optimizing that application for the iPhone — specifically input for multitouch, texture mapping changes for the iPhone, and spatial audio.   It wasn’t enough to just port the game — they had to optimize to make it perform awesomely.

Above when I talked about how great applications are designed well, I wrote a bit about how small teams can iterate applications quickly.   Those iterations are important — when each iteration or revision of an application is substantially “better” than the last one.   The focus on solutions, rather than features, again is critical to apps that perform great.   Typically, as a developer, we want to “see what happens” — which is throwing in a feature.   Mediocre “see what happens” features typically result in mediocre responses from your audience or customer base.   This is why you need to deliver something that is awesomely designed, fully integrated and performs insanely well.

The next version of anything you build should be the best it can possibly be:   think quality increase instead of more features.

Connected

This is the one element that is clearly applicable to the iPhone in a way that other applications of this entire philosophy might not be.   The iPhone is truly a “personal” device.   This means that people who use the iPhone want persoanlized experiences with their applications.

I wrote before that a great application needs to be integrated.   It also needs to work well with other applications that are available on the system, like Mail, Safari, Phone, Maps, etc.   A great application connects to your personal stores of photos and contacts.   But it also connects you with personalized data that is beyond the device.   Server-side preferences and storage, game scores and other forms of media and content — the iPhone is a great capturing device that captures personal information about where you are and what you’re doing with both sound, pictures and text.   It’s also a great personal data visualizer that can aggregate and allow the user to manipulate all this information — where the bulk of the effort for organizing and storing can happen “in the cloud” — all the application needs to do is connect to that information, present it and report back what you as a user do to manipulate it.

SmugMug is a really good example of this.   Market Circle, Inc.’s Billings application is coming out with an iPhone application in early 2009, and that’s going to allow you to synch up with the desktop application.   Remember the Milk just came out with its task-organization application, and I’m considering switching to it from AppIGo’s ToDo, which I’ve loved so far.

Localized

Finally, every great application is world ready.   When it comes to iPhone apps, the US isn’t the only market. The App Store is in 62 countries — more countries have the App Store than sell the iPhone.   Think about that.   Localizing the experience to multiple languages allows you to reach users in other countries, as well as new users in your own country.

Differentiating in this way creates a competitive advantage.   The Remember the Milk app I just mentioned?   It’s localized for every language — and keeps the same interface.   Even the landing page in the App Store is tailored for each langauge.

One word of caution:   avoid using the online translation services.   Hire professional translation services as opposed to using the translation service on Yahoo or Google.   The last thing you want to do is localize a would-be great application that is in either jibberish or messages something completely offensive to an audience.

Final Thoughts

I know that much of this post relates to making a great iPhone app.   Hopefully, you’re connecting the dots and will share in comments below how this might impact how you develop whatever else it is you’re developing.

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More to see starting around 8am Eastern on October 28 from Learning 2008, hosted by Elliott Masie in Orlando, Florida.

Elliott Masie, Learning 2008

As I have the day on Monday, October 27 to attend sessions, I’ll blog as I attend all the sessions I’m in. Turns out Tweeting is a good skill to have in doing live blogging. Watch here for the goods, and I’ll try and put pictures in-line when possible (it’s tough to edit as I type and listen, but what’s a little more multi-tasking, right?).

Tune in here for blogging as it happens for Learning 2008 kickoff starting at 7:30 Eastern.

@moehlert & @mrch0mp3rs

Mark Oehlert and I never met in real life prior to the SCORM 2.0 Workshop down here in Pensacola, but most people down here are surprised to learn that we’ve only ever interfaced via Twitter, and only over the last few months.   It turns out we are kindred spirits with similar interests, educational philosophies, pop cultural references and penchants for hip hop lyrics.   Quite simply, at 140 characters a message, we’ve developed a friendship with the secret in-jokes and knowing glances and eye rolling that is reserved among the closest of traditional face-to-face friendships.

Tom King and I have met a few times over the course of several years and while always cordial, I don’t think either of us would have considered us having anything more than a cursory professional relationship… until Twitter.   We exchange jokes, reply to each others witty amophisms and have developed a similar friendship where the jokes and insights are both common and assumed.

I’ll blog more tomorrow about the unprecedented confluence of ideas, vision and efforts that surface in today’s work.   For now, I’ll simply point out that the social web, even at 140 characters a message, is bringing people closer together and removing barriers to productive collaboration — not distracting from people’s “work.”   It has been a completely happy discovery that there are more people who I’m aligned with than I ever thought; and that the social hierarchies that I once perceived in standards development have given way to nuclear models of collaboration, where the ideas are what draw people together.

Now for some sleep.

Technorati Tags: mark oehlert, tom king, twitter, letsi, scorm 2.0, bacn

At any rate, Melissa is making a documentary about people who are living their lives in “perpetual beta” (like Gmail).   The questions she’s looking to hunt down in her film include:

• Is the planned life worth living?
• If business is moving towards a collaborative and creative platform, what am *I* supposed to be doing?
• How can I still do what I’m passionate about (and still make money)?
• What’s next?

I’m proud to say that I actually met Melissa at the very moment that her idea spawned.   Back a few months when I met with Dan Pink and others for the Bunko Breakfast, Melissa was one of the others — in fact the only other person who came with a video camera.

Melissa is now offering people a chance to get an easy credit in the film as a Twitter Production Consultant which comes with a cool badge for your website and a t-shirt (probably from Threadless, I’d guess).   All you need to do is follow her on Twitter and hand over $20 to get your film credit/web badge/tee — and invites to actual production meetings and events.

I think (hope) the graphic above is the running t-shirt design, and while I’ll support her no matter what (I already paid), I think it’s a KILLER deal and a nice way to help a fellow creative out.

Technorati Tags: lipb, life in perpetual beta, melissa pierce, documentary, twitter, creative, passion, what’s next, dan pink, inspiration, life coach

Mike’s group just released a beta on Facebook for Prize Potato, a free-to-play game.  In this interview from the Austin Game Developer’s Conference (from a few weeks ago), he talks about Prize Potato and a few other novel things he’s got going on in community- and commercial-based gaming.

UPDATE: Thanks to Bob S.  for identifying that I originally embedded the wrong video.   This has been corrected.

It’s a free upgrade if you already have it.   You can open the Spanning Sync pref pane and follow the instructions or manually download it from spanningsync.com/download.

• Contact syncing! Spanning Sync now syncs Address Book with Google contacts.
• Contact photo syncing!
• Trickle syncing! Changes in iCal and Address Book are automatically pushed to Google as they’re made.
• Improved, easier-to-use preference pane UI.
• Dramatically improved network performance.
• Improved support for syncing huge (10,000+ events) calendars
• Improved support for syncing large numbers of contacts
• Improved support for multi-Mac configurations.
• Improved compatibility with MobileMe.
• New user-friendly log window for troubleshooting or checking status.
• Improvements to the “create troubleshooting report” system.
• Tons of other bug fixes and improvements.

Some tips for using the contact sync — if you’ve already turned on the contact sync setting inside of Address Book that would (try to) sync your address book to Google — turn it off.   If you don’t you’ll have a flood of duplicate address book entries, extra characters — general badness.   Thanks to Spanning Sync’s support team for very quickly (and nicely) troubleshooting it for me while in beta — if I had actually rtfm, I probably would have avoided the issue entirely.

Technorati Tags: spanning sync, upgrade, contact sync, google calendar, google contacts, address book, mac, os x, synchronization, mac apps, duplicate entries, duplicate entries in address book, syncrhonization tips, software

Don’t get me started…

Anyway with a month of using the iPhone, I’ve had one lasting annoyance and that’s synching my calendar information with Google Calendar.

I plunked down $20 and picked up Spanning Sync to sync calendars between Google and my Mac. If you’re a Mac user and you normally use Google Calendar to expose your calendaring information from “the cloud,” it’s worth the $20 for the lack of drama.

It just works. The Google CalDAV deal is great from iCal by itself, but you can’t write from the iPhone using only Google’s CalDAV exposure.

I’ve been using the iPhone like a fiend for organizing my consulting, work and home stuff, so after the 15-day free trial period, I bought it. Spanning Sync usually costs $25/year, but you can save $5 by using my discount code if you decide to buy it:

DYHBSH

In full disclosure, if you use my code I’ll get a $5 referral fee from Spanning Sync. Once you’re a subscriber you’ll get a code of your own so you can make money every time one of your other friends subscribes to Spanning Sync.

Every time I synch the iPhone to the Mac, it syncs with iCal. iCal synchs flawlessly with Google. In version 2.0 (coming soon, I read), they’ll also be able to synch contacts — again it should be no fuss.

More on LETSI and SCORM 2.0 coming next week.

Technorati Tags:
iphone, ical, google calendar, spanning sync

• My phone service was absolute shit at Lollapalooza yesterday. 3G barely worked, and EDGE was so godawful slow I could’ve walked my cellphone over to someone across the country and showed them what I typed in better time. Irony here: Lollapalooza is an AT&T sponsored event.
• 3G sucks down battery life way too fast. I get at least double the battery life when 3G is turned off. I’ve already turned off WiFi. I may turn off 3G unless I’m browsing. Idea for an entrepreneurial App developer: make an App that makes battery saving settings a one or two touch deal, instead of the many contextual menus I need to employ to turn shit off and/or on.
• I’m LOVING Appigo’s “ToDo” application. Keeping me and my work very organized.
• There are some real hangups to using GPS. It works great if I turn the phone off and turn Maps on the first time. Once I enter my building at work, where I get great 3G, and then leave the building — it’s like GPS can’t acquire it’s link to a satellite or whatever it does — it just spins forever.
• Speaking of spinning forever, the FlickUp application is absolutely worthless. I picked it up to work around an issue I discovered this morning — I couldn’t import my photos from the iPhone into iPhoto (wtf????). So FlickUp is supposed to just upload my pictures from my work picnic and Lollapalooza to Flickr right? It does nothing. It authenticates with Flickr. I select a photo out of my Camera Roll to upload to Flickr. I press upload… and… it… just… keeps… spinning. Maybe it needs WiFi to work. That would’ve been nice to know before I installed it.
• Speaking of nice to know — Twitteriffic only seems to work with Twitter under 3G, not EDGE. Of course, I was trying this out during Lollapalooza where service was dog slow no matter what… but still.
• When I use a USB iPod dock connector cable to power or sync the phone tethered to my computer, I get an error saying the device is pulling too much power from the computer and the computer will close the port (WTF???). When I use the cable that came with the iPhone, this doesn’t happen. So something about it is not interoperable even with the older cables — that’s pretty f’ing disappointing.
• Making custom ringtones and assigning them to people is fun. My brother, Kevin, is “Holiday in Cambodia.” Suzy is “She Bangs the Drums.”
• If I’m on email or Safari and I do anything data heavy, the iPod seems to skip around a bit. Not predictable but it is repeatable.

Overall, I still give the iPhone a 7/10, because what it does well, it does STELLAR and it does a lot of things that well. The things above aren’t just nitpicky, though. iPhone to iPhoto problems are total FAIL. That should be a slam-dunk no-brainer impossible to screw up.

Technorati Tags: iphone, iphone 3g, issues, flickup, 3g, edge, at&t, cables, appigo, todo, gps, quirks, maps, lollapalooza, fail

UPDATE – 8/5: It seems the issue with the iPhoto/iPhone import was resolved by directly connecting the cable from the iPhone to the computer.  This also seems to resolve my complaint about the power issue — thinking now that maybe it’s an issue with the powered USB hub I was plugging into.  Which is annoying, but at least within a realm of understanding.  Also worth noting that at least as of the 2.0.1 update, FlickUp now works.  I don’t know if the update itself fixed it or not, but it is what it is.

As well, with just a little bit of use, maybe it’s just me but after the update, the phone’s interface feels a lot… snappier.

From the site:

“Enkin” introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services, and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices.
Check out our web page enkin.net.

Charles Stross’ novel, Halting State is an interesting mystery/thriller recommended to me by Rovy Brannon back at Learning 2007, and the major technological device it employs is a world about 4 years away now where the phone is THE pre-eminent device that connects us to the internet. Bounded with glasses, the book shares an impressive vision of how Augmented Reality works in the context of gaming, commerce, recreation, work, productivity — everything.

Enkin looks a LOT like a predecessor to the vision Stross described.

As I continue to work on my pet project of building good SCORM content for the iPhone (just for kicks), this kit from Yahoo will be a big help.

Paul Artiuch at [Wikinomics](http://www.wikinomics.com/) had a fascinating blurb today about[a recent OECD report](http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2008/06/02/working-harder-or-working-smarter/) that compared how many hours workers spend on average in a couple different nations, vs. their GDP. What’s interesting is that the technological capability edge by itself doesn’t look like the big indicator of GDP that productivity might be.

Artiuch writes:

> The OECD numbers, however, show that this linear relationship does not exist. For instance, an average South Korean works almost 1000 hours per year longer than the average Norwegian, while enjoying half the GDP per person. Both countries rank in the top in terms of their use of advanced technologies –Korea might even have a slight edge in terms of internet and mobile adoption. Granted, there are many other factors at play including natural resource wealth, distortions such as wars, workforce participation rates and cultural norms. However, the differences are significant even between seemingly similar countries such as Germany and Italy.

I only mention this because one of the things that Pink and Covey hit at is that the indicators of success are the drive and consistency to keep trying. This is another piece of a performance puzzle that supports that if you have the drive and can keep trying more efficiently… well, to the victor go the spoils.

So keep cranking out that AS3, kids — and reuse the code that works as much as possible

Pink is not alone in his assertions. In fact, if you take a look at Chapter 8 in Karl Kapp’s Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning book, IMHO Kapp very accurately suggests the mindset of how a gamer (substitute “Gen Y” with caution) approaches the notion of a boss: a boss is either a coach and mentor figure who you will dedicate your worklife serving under to support their causes while they impart wisdom and knowledge; or a boss is the rather large and looming obstacle that must be destroyed in order to advance to the next level.

I note to substitute “Gamers” with “Gen Y” cautiously because not every “kid” is a gamer, but there is a lot of overlap demographically and to me there seems to be a solid, if somewhat ambiguous connection.

Another interesting connection I can make from what Pink is saying (particularly about intersecting personal network) is to Duncan J. Watts’ Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age text on Network Theory — where Watts mathematically explains the sociological phenomenon of social networks.

One more connection to recent reading that just occurred to me. Tammy Erickson is a writer and author, and in a Harvard Business Review article she wrote back in February, there’s a quote I’ve pulled that illustrates both Kapp’s and Pink’s points about what opportunities mean for Gen Y:

The critics are concerned that the culture of praise Ys experienced as a child will reach deeply into the adult world, suggesting that they feel insecure if they’re not regularly complimented. Bosses are being made to feel the need to lavish praise on young adults with the threat that they will wither under an unfamiliar compliment deficit.

I’ll let a member of Gen Y rebut this last point. “Young workers today aren’t all spoiled attaboy-addicts,” says Ryan Paugh, 23-year-old co-founder of EmployeeEvolution.com. While he agrees that twentysomethings today may be hungrier for feedback than previous generations were, he adds, “People think of praise in the coddling sense. But what we want is guidance and mentoring — and praise when [my emphasis] we’re on track.