I will be attending Learning 2008, and leading or co-leading two different sessions: Rapid Development and User-Generated Content.

There’s been some fantastic writing of late in the realm of digital learning, education and training. I don’t know if I know about it more because the tools for sharing via RSS are more ubiquitous or there are just more people writing about it — but the point is that ten years ago, this was a professional field that didn’t even exist as its own discipline (but for the Authorware folks) and now we have hundreds of bloggers building up the calluses in their fingertips as they blog away …

I received a [Google Alert](http://www.google.com/alerts/) this morning from [Al Moser's blog](http://elearningslam.blogspot.com/2008/01/thinking-about-scorm.html) where he basically states it’s time to blast our thoughts of reusability, in terms of reusing content objects into other contexts, and instead focus on reuse of content across learning environments. I urge you to read the original post, but let me riff on Mr. Moser’s thought:
The SCORM philosophy will work best if we go back to its original purpose which was to ensure that you could re-use existing (compiled) content from one LMS to another; not from …

Well, I lost about three hours of work as Captivate 2 crashed on me (repeatedly) on a larger branching simulation I’m developing. This prompted me back to my personal Macbook Pro to work on my day-job project in Captivate 3.
Captivate 3 seems to be a bit better with memory management as an application and it “feels” more stable. I don’t know if it actually is or not, but I haven’t crashed yet, and I’m running via Parallels instead of native on my desktop. So that’s good for …

Every now and then, I need to do some quick file conversions and I don’t have my Macbook Pro handy. Zamzar is a really nice web app (that’s free!!!) and it converts most everything to everything.
What I didn’t know, and just realized because I was asked to do it, was that it now takes YouTube URLs and will convert those movies into a variety of movie formats — and it works through my firewall.
So even when Masie sends out video URLs that I can’t see, I can still download …

One of the links that came across my Del.icio.us feed this weekend was a little post about how to make a living at being a freelance web designer without having to be really good at design. The author wrote about the 80-20 rule — that basically getting 80% competent at being a web designer wasn’t really hard — but that last 20% to go from competent to awesome was really really tough, and takes a very long time.
With learning content so similar in every technical way to web content, …

I don’t know how I missed this, but back in May my ol’ pal and programming buddy back in PA — Kraig Mentor published [this article on Director And SCORM](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/director/articles/director_scorm.html).
If you’ve downloaded the [Plug-in Technology Example](http://www.adlnet.gov/downloads/DownloadPage.aspx?ID=169), which demonstrates the code and the activity you can employ to create both Flash and Director-based content objects — that’s the handiwork that Kraig and I worked on in our first months of working together. Kraig, who worked on the Director team for Macromedia, is a pretty nifty dude and he took his …