Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Posting Techniques That Really Work In Sucessful Internet Marketing
Many people are now actually earning money through the internet. With depends upon facing global crisis and several countries experiencing economic dilemmas, many people are now developing and making new methods to make money in the home through home-based companies as well as other ventures to boost their monthly income. Through the wide utilization of computers and internet on the planet, people kristen howe chemistry is now able to find various ways to generate income while at home. One of the most effective and easiest ways to generate income is through website marketing affiliate programs. These programs are very profitable for website owners along with online business businesses.
The initial step to begin earning through website marketing affiliate programs is creating your personal internet site. Creating a unique and effective web site can be very technical and needs proper investment to ensure that the site to essentially gain visitors and generate profit. However, with the recent developments in internet services and technology, setting up a website online is now much easier because of many websites on the internet and applications that help people create sites in just a few steps.
People also can hire or ask help from the professionals who learn how to create online websites. Before making a website, look for a good niche or the most used subjects on the list of online users. When the website is created, gain visitors or web traffic to your site by promoting your site and regularly updating it with information: articles, blogs along with other promotional what to make your internet site kristen howe chemistry full of content. After efficiently promoting your internet site and gaining significant amounts of website traffic, submit your website to the major search engines. Try to find the reputable and common advertisement programs like Google AdWords as well as other internet merchants that need to find affiliate marketers to market their products and services on the web.
As increasing numbers of people are becoming tuned in to the notion of making money online, internet marketing trends are constantly and quickly evolving. Being able to identify the trends and tap into them with an up-to-date marketing plan really can set you ahead in your business.
Today's rough economy is the main topic of many business conversations. This applies to online marketing as well. We shall continue to see recession-proof internet organizations being marketed in addition to various money-saving plans, tools, clubs and forums. If you are not already discussing hawaii of the economy in your marketing, it's time to start.
For a while, one of the primary Website marketing trends included lots of hype. So the web was made up of one big glaringly flashy advertisement after still another, each competing for your attention. It finally seems to be hitting home that flash and hype just isn't kristen howe chemistry the way to go. Whilst it may possibly initially capture some interest from your own target audience, you will have to support it with great high-value content to keep them interested. Your visitors are searching for answers to their issues - make sure that you offer these in your marketing message.
Once you know and understanding these general Internet marketing trends after which adapting your company to maintain together can definitely put you at a benefit.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Robert Shumake - What on earth is The Golden Solution To Commercial Real Estate Investing?
Who seem to said real estate investing is often extremely and also wash? Let me tell you right here which will wholesaling real estate and investing around real estate may be a dirty project. Due to know what circumstance you'll be managing upcoming! http://us.mg4.mail.yahoo.com Many of us cope with a range of persons, predicaments, along with illnesses involving contains every day.
Real Estate Investing includes it's problems, in addition to with this option I had my personal reasonable publish of problems. We almost never ever in your life, actually complete just about any job whatsoever regarding every wholesale dwelling work, nonetheless I had created virtually no different solution about this 1. The very first plan ended up being just to explosive device the home meant for roaches. Once all of us robert shumake performed, we recognized most of us extremely found it necessary to eradicate the many unhealthy out of the house for you to get rid of properly. In one payemnt we all bombed 6 instances over the course of some many days. Preston Ely might have done the particular extermination himself, nonetheless I actually opt to compensate my personal small uncle you need to do it all.
I would possess marketed the home at once obtained I cost the application ideal right from the start. As an alternative As i pricey it all from $24, 900. 00. Preston Ely and Rather than Merrill both equally will concur of which the prices your current low cost home discounts adequately is in highest significance. For those who price these folks also very low, you may be decreasing yourself brief. Inquiring excessive is likely to make them tough to dispose of. Turning out to be a complicated Real Estate Buyer is without a doubt knowing a delighted low to medium at this point. Supplied your ARV, your revive expenses, and also the desirability in the local, everyone go to ones own cost. In the example of that roach property, we over priced it so that it needed 3weeks longer rather than expected to offer the item. We all ultimately discovered an important new buyer to get $18, 000. 00 and also first got it marketed. But that�s not even the top on the account. Like that tens of thousands of roaches weren�t enough of an task.
Persons are highly enjoyable if you only take time to take notice of just what exactly they will point out along with observe how these people act. In the end, this is exactly why simple fact shows are and so preferred. You will watch individuals from the comfort and ease from your lounge office chair.
What exactly they will carry out together with declare tend to be so hugely entertaining considering many people frequently react influenced by emotion. Usually, which will feeling is usually panic. Put from a minor laziness including a drive to believe whatever many people perceive that will justifies his or her panic and even generally there you've got them--the two most wealth-preventing misconceptions in relation to real estate investment investing which were possibly formulated. The ones a couple will be the dad and mom with the 1 / 3.
1. Property is known as a gamble. a pair of. The property market is definitely dangerous. 3. There isn't technique We can oftentimes purchase real-estate.
Robert Kiyosaki, novelist from the Prosperous Dad e book collection, said that there are many people available that truthfully assume real-estate investing--or any sort of investment in any way, really--is supposed to be about fortune. A lot of these shareholders chuck their cash from any situation that seems to be great for them. They also haven't so much considered some time to teach on their own upon exactly what is a very good choice. What "looks good" directly to them is dependant on the solely emotionally charged reaction--or worse--a suppose.
Real estate investment is not effectively contrary to, suggest, Black colored Jack or even Roulette considering the video games tend to be estimating video games. Owning a home will not be any estimating activity. Real estate investment entails looking at monetary forms and also choosing from their store where by you must pay out your hard earned cash. It's not actually in relation to guessing--it's regarding looking at.
Together with Belief Very little. 3, well... that is the most important fairy tale of all. Anybody at all can easily select real-estate, if and when they are likely to consider people to start with essential steps: Ensure you enjoy the investment as a result of replacing the same with variety, which can be normally accomplished because they build an enterprise process, in addition to educate yourself at the same time connected with trading.
What is actually a threat, Kiyosaki says, is definitely disregarding to teach oneself. At the time you overlook ones economical instruction that you're shedding extra income when compared with it is possible to imagine--not primarily the cash a person expend if you start not having shopping, and also your money you will never produce if you happen to opt for to fail to step in the least.
Moral committing is definitely a bit of a news word of mouth. Obtain meaning and even earn a living. Then again when you look at the rear of this thrill you will find robust explanations just how consider moral property getting '08 as one of the most beneficial strategy of investment you may own personal. Mainly because honourable real estate investing remains to be spending, and also it is advisable to create a decent revenue. Ethical investment should be great gain making an investment in order that every person, like the person, victories.
Property paying for 2008? Have never you have that they are joking When i hear a person require? Property checking out 2008 can be expended. Charges are generally falling apart as well as property can not be given away. There may be Fl McMansions for in addition to ebay pertaining to beginning bids associated with $1.
Do not this placed everyone down, real estate investment investing in 2008 is in existence plus properly, should you choose to it ideal. Observe I actually reported which will should want to do this perfect. If you don't then you can obtain used.
Do you do it right your self? Indeed, for anybody who is fantastic in the application. Having said that there may be a significantly better robert shumake approach to complete the work by way of a publicly bought and sold YOU company function through an example of Americas respected marketers, committing to socially acutely aware real estate investment.
Socially alert property investments? What is considered in which?
I'd like to explain to you the most impressive honest real estate property purchases that you can possess during a lot of these crisis.
It can be lawful housing investments that provides positive aspects that will other individuals along with the individual, mainly the individuals who inhabit your financial commitment real estate as well as the neighborhood.
Ok, i'll explain additionally. One of the greatest real estate investment opportunities prospects is without a doubt purchasing ordinary residences regarding typical People in america during what person are in normal and surrounding suburbs with the ones locations which will move collectively for making up our own united states. Households having worth in $100, 000 or simply a lesser amount of, that many people inhabit right this moment. Households that happen to be EVEN NOW purchased even involved with the recession, for the reason that -- persons always really need to stay in them all.
Visualize a service which decides by far the most encouraging suburbs designed for investment funds, buys a lot of houses throughout those and surrounding suburbs out of authorities much of our councils with clearly beneath market place, invests on individuals and surrounding suburbs by building cultural options for instance parks together with playgrounds together with other improvements to boost all around existing standards of these just who reside right now there, in addition to refurbishes the particular households people purchase to somewhat of a great typical.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Kids Making Money
In a win for those in favor of child labor, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has announced that business mogul Donald Trump will employ at least 10 poor children as "apprentices."
On Monday, Gingrich became fifth GOP candidate to meet with Trump ahead of a Newsmax debate hosted by the notorious birther.
"As a number of you know, I've been making the case that we need work very hard to help poor children in poor neighborhoods acquire the opportunity to work," Gingrich said at a press conference with Trump.
"I've asked [Trump] to take one of the poorer schools in New York and basically offer at least 10 apprenticeships to kids from that school to get them into the world of work, and to get them into an opportunity to earn money, and get them into the habit of showing up and realizing that effort gets rewarded, and that American is all about the work ethic."
For his part, Trump gave Gingrich all the credit for the idea.
"It was a great honor to have Newt up here," the business mogul remarked. "He did mention if I could do something for some of the kids in very, very poor schools throughout the city. I thought it was a great idea. We call it apprenticeship and we all know about 'The Apprentice.'"
"We're going to be picking ten young, wonderful children, and we're going to make them apprenti. ... It was Newt's idea, and I thought it was a great idea."
(The word "apprenti" doesn't actually appear in the English dictionary. The plural form of apprentice is apprentices.)
The initiative is Gingrich's attempt to put a positive spin on his call to do away with some restrictions on child labor, which he has called "truly stupid."
"Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school," the former House Speaker told an audience at Harvard University’s Kennedy School in November.
Last week, Gingrich continued to call for the poorest kids to enter the work force.
"Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday," he said. "They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash, unless it is illegal."
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New York Times:
MIDLAND, Mich. — Here, at the nation’s oldest, most celebrated, school for would-be Santa Clauses, much has stayed exactly the same over its nearly 75 years. A proper Claus ought to have pleasant breath, his beard curled just so and a hearty laugh that rumbles not from the throat but from deep below the diaphragm.
Yet this year, from the holiday parades, to the cheery carols piping from Main Street loudspeakers, to the “this way to Santa” lines at shopping centers, something more sobering has cast its shadow: the economic slump.
The result is a Christmas season in which Santas — including the 115 of them in this year’s graduating class of the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School — must learn to swiftly size up families’ financial circumstances, gently scale back children’s Christmas gift requests and even how to answer the wish some say they have been hearing with more frequency — “Can you bring my parent a job?”
Santas here tell of children who appear on their laps with lists that include the latest, most expensive toys and their parents, standing off to the side, stealthily but imploringly shaking their heads no. On the flip side, some, like Fred Honerkamp, have been visited by children whose expectations seem to have sunk to match the gloom; not long ago, a boy asked him for only one item — a pair of sneakers that actually fit.
“In the end, Santas have to be sure to never promise anything,” said Mr. Honerkamp, an alumnus of the school who also lectures here. He has devised his own tale about a wayward elf and slowed toy production at the North Pole for children who are requesting a gift clearly beyond their family’s price range. “It’s hard to watch sometimes because the children are like little barometers, mirrors on what the country has been through.”
The Santa school itself, held in this small, central Michigan city over three days every fall, may offer some measure of the nation’s woes. Last month, it drew the largest class of its history. And while most of the men were longtime, passionate Santas looking to hone their skills in hair bleaching, story-telling and sign language, at least a handful, including an aerospace engineer and an accountant, said they were testing out Santa school in part because of slim times, shrunken retirement accounts, or a dearth of work altogether.
“I’m trying it,” said Joe Stolte, who, at 28, was decades younger than most of the bearded, portly, jarringly similar-looking men in rows all around him. “There are no jobs out there — it’s ridiculous,” he said, adding that he had been surviving by doing odd jobs and cutting lawns in Saginaw and that his mother had helped him come up with the tuition ($400 for first-timers, $350 for others). “I like being Santa Claus. And I figure it comes once a year. It’s a thing that’s going to be there.”
At the school, which takes place partly in an elaborate, cookie-filled Santa House on Main Street, there is a long-standing if polite debate over the role of money in this entire jolly endeavor. The essence of the split? Nursing Home Volunteer Santa versus Mall Santa.
Kevin Scott Fleming, of Evansville, Ind., lectured fellow Santas on the evolution of a character resembling Saint Nicholas, the Bishop of Myra, and described making money off the beloved character as “poison, absolutely poison.” Others, like Pat Adams, of Madisonville, Ky., who was soon to fly to Las Vegas for a 40-day stint in a mall, with help from an agent and paid casino-hotel and plane arrangements, saw no harm. “I do well,” he said, adding unapologetically that Mall Santas may earn between $25 and $50 an hour.
“It’s a personal choice,” said Thomas F. Valent, a longtime Santa, who took over operations of the school in 1986 and moved it to Midland, where he also runs a construction company. “The important thing is that people really like Santa. He stands for all good things. So you just have to be the best Santa you can.”
Still, this is a practical education. Along with training in how to store your wig, how best to answer the questions of kindergartners and how to perform on your local cable access television station, a financial planner advised the Santas (and a handful of Mrs. Clauses) to open pension funds and contribute as much as possible to 401(k) retirement accounts. A marketing consultant and gym instructor urged the Santas, a few of whom dozed in their chairs, to create their own Web sites and extolled the benefits of Facebook and Twitter. “Drive ’em, drive ’em, drive ’em to that Web site!” Sabrina Ann Zielinski, the consultant, told the class.
There are other Santa schools. But this one carries a history that leads many here to describe it as the Harvard of the genre and to list it prominently on their résumés and business cards. The school was started in 1937 by Charles W. Howard, a former Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade Santa whose memory is revered in these halls. It was initially based in Albion, N.Y., setting a set of more professional standards for department store Santas.
Some of the lessons might come in handy any year: do not stay too long or children will lose interest; insist on a good, private place (not a boiler room) for changing into your suit; keep your hands in plain view.
But the message has shifted with the times. Some Santas say they now feel a larger obligation to speak up in the face of giant, expensive wish lists, an obligation to lower expectations in a way that only Santas (not parents) can get away with. At least one Santa, Gary Christie, had devised a specific routine for talking children out of their demand for an iPod or the like.
Another, Rick Parris, said, “When kids start asking for the world now, I just say, ‘Hey, look, Johnny, you ain’t getting all that.’ ” The former Alabama state trooper added, “I just make sure to let them know that Santa seldom brings everything on a list.”
Even with the economic downturn, not all the Christmas lists have grown shorter. Some children show up with elaborate printouts, cross-referenced spread sheets and clippings from catalogs. “I try to guide the children into not so unrealistic things, and I do tell them that Santa’s been cutting back too,” said Tom Ruperd, of Caro, Mich., who added that parents often silently signal their appreciation.
When questions get more complex, Mr. Ruperd said, they sometimes require “creative answers.” The solutions, it seems, may be beyond what any school could prepare one for, and possibly out of Santa’s reach altogether. “If they asked for something that’s totally impossible — a job for Daddy, say — I usually tell them, ‘Santa specializes in toys, but we can always pray on the other,’ ” Mr. Ruperd said. “ ‘Is there anything in toys that you’d like?’ ”
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Friday, December 2, 2011
Sunday, November 20, 2011
why internet marketing
I’ve been itching to write some about the proliferation of mobile devices in the wake of Tablet computers like the Apple iPad, the Samsung Galaxy, the Blackberry Playbook and a myriad of others for quite a while. Much of what I’ve read is very technical and always seems a little heavy on hype and light on practical solutions for eLearning. The salient question is, should we as eLearning developers be looking at ways to move our content onto these mobile devices in order to more effectively reach our audience? The answer is that we of course should, but also that we are faced with a host of new challenges as soon as we attempt to do so. So in this post I’ll try to answer as much of that as I can, as objectively as I can, without getting lost in the specifics of the technology.
A little Context
First it should be noted that the idea of notebook computing didn’t originate with the iPad, it began long before with a host of solutions that attempted to offer the comfort and familiarity. The real breakthrough with the iPad is probably owed in part to a great GUI (graphical user interface) in part to aspirational marketing (it’s what the guy next to you oggles on a long flight) and in part to the availability of enough networking access to make user experiences on cloud based devices a positive experience.
In many ways notebook computing is also a terrible step backward. It doesn’t allow you to run your most used software applications, it is often slow to download and slow to perform, and it really doesn’t facilitate many of the most potent uses of the Internet because of it’s lack of in-browser Flash support. The notion that our devices and our software do this little dance of two steps forward and one step back is not at all new. We have been doing this dance for a long time. One lifelong eLearning developer infamously cracked “I could do that 20 years ago with Authorware” to virtually every “new” feature touted by various eLearning software vendors. He was of course quite correct, that we had better control of the computer years ago, and that the ongoing battle between ubiquity, accessibility, ease of use and ever-evolving hardware has often reduced the amount of control we have over the devices that display our eLearning content.
Social implications
The push-pull of technologies vs. ease of use is only one of the concerns we should examine as we consider migrating content to mobile devices and tablets. There are social considerations as well. Are we demanding too much of people? Are we introducing an expectation that they be ‘always available’ by providing technologies that facilitate constant connection?
This process, of push and pull between our desire to be free from the inherent restrictions of our technologies and our desire to take full advantage of them is a theme that has been replayed throughout the ages, even long before our technologies were digital. Certainly it’s something we see echoed in literature. Consider for example Neal Stephenson’s dystopic and all-too often prophetic novel “Snow Crash.” Stephenson describes a world that is almost inseparably chained to it’s technologies. He further extends the metaphor by introducing a notion of mental ‘programming’ and in essence makes us all the products of a vast machine.
We hear everyday in our incidental conversations the evidence that for many of us, the ‘always on’ interconnectedness of social networks, emails and web communities creates a difficult balance of welcomed interaction and unwelcome interruption. Tablets fall into this picture as a device we hope can help mediate, can make it easier to keep up with everything. They can make it easier for us to remain connected, and hopefully the software thereupon can help us filter and sort the vast array of communications we receive.
State of the dream technology
The tablets we have today, fall short of those promised us in Science fiction films and novels like Snow Crash, Minority Report or Avatar. In our imaginations and aspirations we are promised a totally mobile solution that will effortlessly enable transfer between any of our computing devices with little more than a flick of the wrist. It can be difficult to comprehend why then, we now see a technology industry that appears to be moving in the opposite direction. It appears that operating systems are splintering – and forming walls of incompatibility.
Today’s tablets do attempt to share data across devices, but generally each one prefers to lock it all into it’s own little silo. The data is often in different formats from device to device, and operating systems differ on each device making it often quite difficult to work with things in the same authoring applications across various devices. While some software companies are working actively to create cloud based application solutions, many of the creators of cloud storage systems and hardware appear to be prepping for a protocol and standards showdown. There’s nothing new in such efforts, it is in fact the way we have seen technologies evolve for ages.
The role of standards in technology adoption
Consider the historical example of Philo Farnsworth, who brought us Television. Farnsworth was only 15 when he came up with the idea for projecting television (which most then would have thought of as radio with pictures) by observing the back and forth motion of a plow tilling a field. Farnsworth and RCA, then RCA and Zenith and a variety of others would then begin a long series of law suits both to establish ownership of the invention(s) but also subsequently to establish the universal standard that would allow all televisions to receive a consistent ‘type’ of signal. Whether its VHS/Beta or TV standard A vs. TV standard B, we generally see media fall into these kinds of early disputes whenever there are encoders and decoders that need to standardize in order to ensure inter-operability.
In the early days of the World Wide Web we had similar competing standards for the distribution and sharing of information, including things like Telnet, Gopher and the early HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). While HTML quickly became the dominant standard, the individual companies which produced decoders (we call them web browsers) and encoders (we call them Web page editors) all used different standards to determine how to decode or encode the messages. In fact HTML is still implemented in a variety of ways today across different browsers – that’s why you often hear a tech geek say, well open it in a different browser, when you have trouble with seeing the content on a given web page. Adobe even has a cloud based service called Browser Lab that allows web developers preview overlays of their websites as they would appear on each of the major browsers, so that they can avoid big differences.
Plug-ins and extensions bridge the compatibility gaps
One of the big reasons plugins like Shockwave, QuickTime, Flash & Reader became so common as add on’s to a web browser, was because they could render things exactly the same way on any machine in any browser, so designers and producers preferred them because its much cheaper and more efficient to produce things one time than it is to produce them many times. The other reasons were because these plugins enabled levels of interactivity that the browsers could not.
Understanding the Why Now of HTML5
So why does that seem to be changing? Like everything, web page technology is evolving and improving. The most recent definition of Web page standards is soon going to be HTML5 (yes it isn’t really fully in place yet.) This new fifth generation of HTML (web pages) supports much deeper levels of interactivity than earlier versions. It also has better support for video, audio, animation, and interaction. So many of the things that couldn’t be done with a web page alone in the past, will soon be possible without using any kind of plugin like Flash. There are also a lot of things that still won’t be possible without that plugin, but the excitement is about the possibilities of creating more engaging content without the need for a plugin.
Now while it’s simpler to think of things in a single format and as a single output, this thinking doesn’t yet really apply well to our desktop computers the same as it does to our mobile devices. Phones have become smarter, and tablets are beginning to look and feel a lot more like computers, but the purposes and abilities of the devices are not yet really identical. So while we might imagine it would be great to just grab something from the computer and toss it to our tablet – the real experience is usually more frustrating and less plausible.
For now, we’re going to see folks keep producing content that is optimized for the desktop experience, but we’ll see an increasing desire to ensure that it will also play on mobile devices.
This change comes with a couple of big potential problems. First, virtually all of the content created for eLearning that exists today has been created and deployed using Flash technology. Regardless of whether you author your content with Captivate, Presenter or most any other technology – the output is most likely Flash. If a potential playback device doesn’t support Flash playback in a browser, then even if the new content you create is all outputting HTML5, the older content you’ve already created will still not play back on such a device. That’s nothing to shrug off. There are literally millions of course modules out there that people use every day, that are inaccessible on some mobile devices.
Now the only major playback environment that doesn’t support Flash in browser is called iOS. This is the operating system on Apple devices like the iPad, iPod and iPhone. Unfortunately for eLearning developers this is a very popular environment, so the push-pull strikes us hard here, where we either have to recreate all of our content (dating back more than a decade) or we tell our users that they cannot use these devices to access our content, or we need solutions that will help us make this content available on the iOS devices.
What should we do then?
This leads to the next potential problem. There aren’t yet any good authoring solutions for publishing to HTML5 rather than Flash, and still retaining the workflows, interactivity and other experiences that we have adopted for eLearning. There are some ways to author HTML5 content, but they are not workflows that have been customized to eLearning. The good news, there are some early contenders that are making fast progress, and that are enabling developers to continue to work in both the Flash and HTML5 environment, therein maximizing compatibility.
The Adobe Captivate Team is leading this charge. They’ve recently announced a public Beta of the Captivate SWF (Flash) to HTML5 converter. Yes, you can just click that link to download it. This amazing converter actually takes your Captivate 5.5 created flash projects and converts them into web pages that use the HTML5 standard. It is being hosted on Adobe Labs, which is a sort of test bed for Adobe projects that may or may not one day be integrated into actual products.
One of the coolest things, is that it’s totally free and you can download it already and play around with it. Another is that it makes web pages, so any content you create is yours forever – it’s just a web page after all. The first version only supported the basic workflows and elements commonly found in application capture, but at eLearning Guild’s DevLearn conference last week I was able to give folks a preview of the next version. This new version includes support for most question types (so yes, you can create quizzes in HTML5 using the Captivate 5.5 editor) and even supports integration with Scorm compliant Learning Management Systems. As far as I know this will make Captivate the first full featured eLearning editor to support quizzing and Scorm compliant reporting both in native Flash and in converted HTML5. So if you’re looking for a solution for those iOS devices today – Captivate’s new HTML5 converter is likely your best bet.
You’ll also find similar HTML5 converters from other teams at Adobe, Including an HTML5 converter for Illustrator, and HTML5 editing solutions for Dreamweaver. There is also the Wallaby project for general Flash conversion to HTML5, specializing on animation as well as the recently announced Adobe Edge. Edge and Dreamweaver are HTML5 editors for creating dynamic and engaging HTML5 content, while the others are essentially converters.
I suspect we’ll see solutions like this for a while and it’s no surprise that Adobe is leading the way with a custom HTML5 editing and creation utility like Edge which is already available for public use via labs.adobe.com. If you are familiar with After Effects or Premiere, the interface of Edge will seem pretty instantly familiar. It’s easy to use and you can build animations with relative ease.
Final reflections
HTML5 was clearly the hot topic at this year’s DevLearn conference in Las Vegas. To be honest I found it both exciting and more than a little frustrating. In the area of eLearning we’ve managed for a long time to create specialized software solutions that simplify interactive media creation for eLearning developers, Instructional Designers, and Subject Matter Experts. In my opinion, this frees trainers and learning specialists up to focus on the education rather than spending their time becoming multi-media developers.
The world of HTML has, to be honest, never done much to mitigate the technology – in fact historically HTML editors have always been very careful to always expose the code under the hood quite easily. From a media developer’s point of view, this is a big plus – it makes it easier to make small changes if something in the graphical editor isn’t behaving as needed. From an eLearning developer’s point of view – I think this presents a sizeable challenge. The balance between ease-of-use and power is a constant theme in software. I’m just a little worried that a rapid shift toward HTML5 may be an enormous shift away from the ease of use that is now very popular in eLearning authoring.
Converters of course give us an ideal ease-of-use scenario. We can just keep using our tools and convert as needed. It’s also reasonable to expect that some extant tools will at least in part support output to HTML5. Editors might be fine, but I think we’ll want to see specialized editors for eLearning, ones that accomodate our needs, and accelerate our development time-lines. For a while, we may well end up publishing two versions of things, one for general consumption and one for people on iOS devices.
We might also see the landscape (or in this case the divergent operating systems) splinter even further before standards are broadly enough adopted to move us back onto a more stable situation. Times like these are wonderful for innovation – and I expect we’ll see some exciting new ideas bubbling up. But they are also generally not at all good for steady, reliable growth. It becomes difficult to know what to expect – and you can find yourself creating or preserving content that you don’t feel certain will remain viable in 5, 10 or 15 years.
I wouldn’t expect that you’ll have serious problems or limitations with your current Flash based content, nor would I guarantee that HTML5 content will remain viable – but realistically that level of uncertainty has existed for the bast 20 years as well. Perhaps the most realistic approach is to expect the materials you create today will have a shelf life, which is likely given their content anyway.
Specific Recommendations for Action (A ToDo list for HTML5 / Mobile):
I know you all will have questions, comments and concerns as it relates to HTML5. Don’t be shy – fill the comments section below with all your ideas. Let’s get this discussion underway.
I’ve been itching to write some about the proliferation of mobile devices in the wake of Tablet computers like the Apple iPad, the Samsung Galaxy, the Blackberry Playbook and a myriad of others for quite a while. Much of what I’ve read is very technical and always seems a little heavy on hype and light on practical solutions for eLearning. The salient question is, should we as eLearning developers be looking at ways to move our content onto these mobile devices in order to more effectively reach our audience? The answer is that we of course should, but also that we are faced with a host of new challenges as soon as we attempt to do so. So in this post I’ll try to answer as much of that as I can, as objectively as I can, without getting lost in the specifics of the technology.
A little Context
First it should be noted that the idea of notebook computing didn’t originate with the iPad, it began long before with a host of solutions that attempted to offer the comfort and familiarity. The real breakthrough with the iPad is probably owed in part to a great GUI (graphical user interface) in part to aspirational marketing (it’s what the guy next to you oggles on a long flight) and in part to the availability of enough networking access to make user experiences on cloud based devices a positive experience.
In many ways notebook computing is also a terrible step backward. It doesn’t allow you to run your most used software applications, it is often slow to download and slow to perform, and it really doesn’t facilitate many of the most potent uses of the Internet because of it’s lack of in-browser Flash support. The notion that our devices and our software do this little dance of two steps forward and one step back is not at all new. We have been doing this dance for a long time. One lifelong eLearning developer infamously cracked “I could do that 20 years ago with Authorware” to virtually every “new” feature touted by various eLearning software vendors. He was of course quite correct, that we had better control of the computer years ago, and that the ongoing battle between ubiquity, accessibility, ease of use and ever-evolving hardware has often reduced the amount of control we have over the devices that display our eLearning content.
Social implications
The push-pull of technologies vs. ease of use is only one of the concerns we should examine as we consider migrating content to mobile devices and tablets. There are social considerations as well. Are we demanding too much of people? Are we introducing an expectation that they be ‘always available’ by providing technologies that facilitate constant connection?
This process, of push and pull between our desire to be free from the inherent restrictions of our technologies and our desire to take full advantage of them is a theme that has been replayed throughout the ages, even long before our technologies were digital. Certainly it’s something we see echoed in literature. Consider for example Neal Stephenson’s dystopic and all-too often prophetic novel “Snow Crash.” Stephenson describes a world that is almost inseparably chained to it’s technologies. He further extends the metaphor by introducing a notion of mental ‘programming’ and in essence makes us all the products of a vast machine.
We hear everyday in our incidental conversations the evidence that for many of us, the ‘always on’ interconnectedness of social networks, emails and web communities creates a difficult balance of welcomed interaction and unwelcome interruption. Tablets fall into this picture as a device we hope can help mediate, can make it easier to keep up with everything. They can make it easier for us to remain connected, and hopefully the software thereupon can help us filter and sort the vast array of communications we receive.
State of the dream technology
The tablets we have today, fall short of those promised us in Science fiction films and novels like Snow Crash, Minority Report or Avatar. In our imaginations and aspirations we are promised a totally mobile solution that will effortlessly enable transfer between any of our computing devices with little more than a flick of the wrist. It can be difficult to comprehend why then, we now see a technology industry that appears to be moving in the opposite direction. It appears that operating systems are splintering – and forming walls of incompatibility.
Today’s tablets do attempt to share data across devices, but generally each one prefers to lock it all into it’s own little silo. The data is often in different formats from device to device, and operating systems differ on each device making it often quite difficult to work with things in the same authoring applications across various devices. While some software companies are working actively to create cloud based application solutions, many of the creators of cloud storage systems and hardware appear to be prepping for a protocol and standards showdown. There’s nothing new in such efforts, it is in fact the way we have seen technologies evolve for ages.
The role of standards in technology adoption
Consider the historical example of Philo Farnsworth, who brought us Television. Farnsworth was only 15 when he came up with the idea for projecting television (which most then would have thought of as radio with pictures) by observing the back and forth motion of a plow tilling a field. Farnsworth and RCA, then RCA and Zenith and a variety of others would then begin a long series of law suits both to establish ownership of the invention(s) but also subsequently to establish the universal standard that would allow all televisions to receive a consistent ‘type’ of signal. Whether its VHS/Beta or TV standard A vs. TV standard B, we generally see media fall into these kinds of early disputes whenever there are encoders and decoders that need to standardize in order to ensure inter-operability.
In the early days of the World Wide Web we had similar competing standards for the distribution and sharing of information, including things like Telnet, Gopher and the early HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). While HTML quickly became the dominant standard, the individual companies which produced decoders (we call them web browsers) and encoders (we call them Web page editors) all used different standards to determine how to decode or encode the messages. In fact HTML is still implemented in a variety of ways today across different browsers – that’s why you often hear a tech geek say, well open it in a different browser, when you have trouble with seeing the content on a given web page. Adobe even has a cloud based service called Browser Lab that allows web developers preview overlays of their websites as they would appear on each of the major browsers, so that they can avoid big differences.
Plug-ins and extensions bridge the compatibility gaps
One of the big reasons plugins like Shockwave, QuickTime, Flash & Reader became so common as add on’s to a web browser, was because they could render things exactly the same way on any machine in any browser, so designers and producers preferred them because its much cheaper and more efficient to produce things one time than it is to produce them many times. The other reasons were because these plugins enabled levels of interactivity that the browsers could not.
Understanding the Why Now of HTML5
So why does that seem to be changing? Like everything, web page technology is evolving and improving. The most recent definition of Web page standards is soon going to be HTML5 (yes it isn’t really fully in place yet.) This new fifth generation of HTML (web pages) supports much deeper levels of interactivity than earlier versions. It also has better support for video, audio, animation, and interaction. So many of the things that couldn’t be done with a web page alone in the past, will soon be possible without using any kind of plugin like Flash. There are also a lot of things that still won’t be possible without that plugin, but the excitement is about the possibilities of creating more engaging content without the need for a plugin.
Now while it’s simpler to think of things in a single format and as a single output, this thinking doesn’t yet really apply well to our desktop computers the same as it does to our mobile devices. Phones have become smarter, and tablets are beginning to look and feel a lot more like computers, but the purposes and abilities of the devices are not yet really identical. So while we might imagine it would be great to just grab something from the computer and toss it to our tablet – the real experience is usually more frustrating and less plausible.
For now, we’re going to see folks keep producing content that is optimized for the desktop experience, but we’ll see an increasing desire to ensure that it will also play on mobile devices.
This change comes with a couple of big potential problems. First, virtually all of the content created for eLearning that exists today has been created and deployed using Flash technology. Regardless of whether you author your content with Captivate, Presenter or most any other technology – the output is most likely Flash. If a potential playback device doesn’t support Flash playback in a browser, then even if the new content you create is all outputting HTML5, the older content you’ve already created will still not play back on such a device. That’s nothing to shrug off. There are literally millions of course modules out there that people use every day, that are inaccessible on some mobile devices.
Now the only major playback environment that doesn’t support Flash in browser is called iOS. This is the operating system on Apple devices like the iPad, iPod and iPhone. Unfortunately for eLearning developers this is a very popular environment, so the push-pull strikes us hard here, where we either have to recreate all of our content (dating back more than a decade) or we tell our users that they cannot use these devices to access our content, or we need solutions that will help us make this content available on the iOS devices.
What should we do then?
This leads to the next potential problem. There aren’t yet any good authoring solutions for publishing to HTML5 rather than Flash, and still retaining the workflows, interactivity and other experiences that we have adopted for eLearning. There are some ways to author HTML5 content, but they are not workflows that have been customized to eLearning. The good news, there are some early contenders that are making fast progress, and that are enabling developers to continue to work in both the Flash and HTML5 environment, therein maximizing compatibility.
The Adobe Captivate Team is leading this charge. They’ve recently announced a public Beta of the Captivate SWF (Flash) to HTML5 converter. Yes, you can just click that link to download it. This amazing converter actually takes your Captivate 5.5 created flash projects and converts them into web pages that use the HTML5 standard. It is being hosted on Adobe Labs, which is a sort of test bed for Adobe projects that may or may not one day be integrated into actual products.
One of the coolest things, is that it’s totally free and you can download it already and play around with it. Another is that it makes web pages, so any content you create is yours forever – it’s just a web page after all. The first version only supported the basic workflows and elements commonly found in application capture, but at eLearning Guild’s DevLearn conference last week I was able to give folks a preview of the next version. This new version includes support for most question types (so yes, you can create quizzes in HTML5 using the Captivate 5.5 editor) and even supports integration with Scorm compliant Learning Management Systems. As far as I know this will make Captivate the first full featured eLearning editor to support quizzing and Scorm compliant reporting both in native Flash and in converted HTML5. So if you’re looking for a solution for those iOS devices today – Captivate’s new HTML5 converter is likely your best bet.
You’ll also find similar HTML5 converters from other teams at Adobe, Including an HTML5 converter for Illustrator, and HTML5 editing solutions for Dreamweaver. There is also the Wallaby project for general Flash conversion to HTML5, specializing on animation as well as the recently announced Adobe Edge. Edge and Dreamweaver are HTML5 editors for creating dynamic and engaging HTML5 content, while the others are essentially converters.
I suspect we’ll see solutions like this for a while and it’s no surprise that Adobe is leading the way with a custom HTML5 editing and creation utility like Edge which is already available for public use via labs.adobe.com. If you are familiar with After Effects or Premiere, the interface of Edge will seem pretty instantly familiar. It’s easy to use and you can build animations with relative ease.
Final reflections
HTML5 was clearly the hot topic at this year’s DevLearn conference in Las Vegas. To be honest I found it both exciting and more than a little frustrating. In the area of eLearning we’ve managed for a long time to create specialized software solutions that simplify interactive media creation for eLearning developers, Instructional Designers, and Subject Matter Experts. In my opinion, this frees trainers and learning specialists up to focus on the education rather than spending their time becoming multi-media developers.
The world of HTML has, to be honest, never done much to mitigate the technology – in fact historically HTML editors have always been very careful to always expose the code under the hood quite easily. From a media developer’s point of view, this is a big plus – it makes it easier to make small changes if something in the graphical editor isn’t behaving as needed. From an eLearning developer’s point of view – I think this presents a sizeable challenge. The balance between ease-of-use and power is a constant theme in software. I’m just a little worried that a rapid shift toward HTML5 may be an enormous shift away from the ease of use that is now very popular in eLearning authoring.
Converters of course give us an ideal ease-of-use scenario. We can just keep using our tools and convert as needed. It’s also reasonable to expect that some extant tools will at least in part support output to HTML5. Editors might be fine, but I think we’ll want to see specialized editors for eLearning, ones that accomodate our needs, and accelerate our development time-lines. For a while, we may well end up publishing two versions of things, one for general consumption and one for people on iOS devices.
We might also see the landscape (or in this case the divergent operating systems) splinter even further before standards are broadly enough adopted to move us back onto a more stable situation. Times like these are wonderful for innovation – and I expect we’ll see some exciting new ideas bubbling up. But they are also generally not at all good for steady, reliable growth. It becomes difficult to know what to expect – and you can find yourself creating or preserving content that you don’t feel certain will remain viable in 5, 10 or 15 years.
I wouldn’t expect that you’ll have serious problems or limitations with your current Flash based content, nor would I guarantee that HTML5 content will remain viable – but realistically that level of uncertainty has existed for the bast 20 years as well. Perhaps the most realistic approach is to expect the materials you create today will have a shelf life, which is likely given their content anyway.
Specific Recommendations for Action (A ToDo list for HTML5 / Mobile):
I know you all will have questions, comments and concerns as it relates to HTML5. Don’t be shy – fill the comments section below with all your ideas. Let’s get this discussion underway.
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I’ve been itching to write some about the proliferation of mobile devices in the wake of Tablet computers like the Apple iPad, the Samsung Galaxy, the Blackberry Playbook and a myriad of others for quite a while. Much of what I’ve read is very technical and always seems a little heavy on hype and light on practical solutions for eLearning. The salient question is, should we as eLearning developers be looking at ways to move our content onto these mobile devices in order to more effectively reach our audience? The answer is that we of course should, but also that we are faced with a host of new challenges as soon as we attempt to do so. So in this post I’ll try to answer as much of that as I can, as objectively as I can, without getting lost in the specifics of the technology.
A little Context
First it should be noted that the idea of notebook computing didn’t originate with the iPad, it began long before with a host of solutions that attempted to offer the comfort and familiarity. The real breakthrough with the iPad is probably owed in part to a great GUI (graphical user interface) in part to aspirational marketing (it’s what the guy next to you oggles on a long flight) and in part to the availability of enough networking access to make user experiences on cloud based devices a positive experience.
In many ways notebook computing is also a terrible step backward. It doesn’t allow you to run your most used software applications, it is often slow to download and slow to perform, and it really doesn’t facilitate many of the most potent uses of the Internet because of it’s lack of in-browser Flash support. The notion that our devices and our software do this little dance of two steps forward and one step back is not at all new. We have been doing this dance for a long time. One lifelong eLearning developer infamously cracked “I could do that 20 years ago with Authorware” to virtually every “new” feature touted by various eLearning software vendors. He was of course quite correct, that we had better control of the computer years ago, and that the ongoing battle between ubiquity, accessibility, ease of use and ever-evolving hardware has often reduced the amount of control we have over the devices that display our eLearning content.
Social implications
The push-pull of technologies vs. ease of use is only one of the concerns we should examine as we consider migrating content to mobile devices and tablets. There are social considerations as well. Are we demanding too much of people? Are we introducing an expectation that they be ‘always available’ by providing technologies that facilitate constant connection?
This process, of push and pull between our desire to be free from the inherent restrictions of our technologies and our desire to take full advantage of them is a theme that has been replayed throughout the ages, even long before our technologies were digital. Certainly it’s something we see echoed in literature. Consider for example Neal Stephenson’s dystopic and all-too often prophetic novel “Snow Crash.” Stephenson describes a world that is almost inseparably chained to it’s technologies. He further extends the metaphor by introducing a notion of mental ‘programming’ and in essence makes us all the products of a vast machine.
We hear everyday in our incidental conversations the evidence that for many of us, the ‘always on’ interconnectedness of social networks, emails and web communities creates a difficult balance of welcomed interaction and unwelcome interruption. Tablets fall into this picture as a device we hope can help mediate, can make it easier to keep up with everything. They can make it easier for us to remain connected, and hopefully the software thereupon can help us filter and sort the vast array of communications we receive.
State of the dream technology
The tablets we have today, fall short of those promised us in Science fiction films and novels like Snow Crash, Minority Report or Avatar. In our imaginations and aspirations we are promised a totally mobile solution that will effortlessly enable transfer between any of our computing devices with little more than a flick of the wrist. It can be difficult to comprehend why then, we now see a technology industry that appears to be moving in the opposite direction. It appears that operating systems are splintering – and forming walls of incompatibility.
Today’s tablets do attempt to share data across devices, but generally each one prefers to lock it all into it’s own little silo. The data is often in different formats from device to device, and operating systems differ on each device making it often quite difficult to work with things in the same authoring applications across various devices. While some software companies are working actively to create cloud based application solutions, many of the creators of cloud storage systems and hardware appear to be prepping for a protocol and standards showdown. There’s nothing new in such efforts, it is in fact the way we have seen technologies evolve for ages.
The role of standards in technology adoption
Consider the historical example of Philo Farnsworth, who brought us Television. Farnsworth was only 15 when he came up with the idea for projecting television (which most then would have thought of as radio with pictures) by observing the back and forth motion of a plow tilling a field. Farnsworth and RCA, then RCA and Zenith and a variety of others would then begin a long series of law suits both to establish ownership of the invention(s) but also subsequently to establish the universal standard that would allow all televisions to receive a consistent ‘type’ of signal. Whether its VHS/Beta or TV standard A vs. TV standard B, we generally see media fall into these kinds of early disputes whenever there are encoders and decoders that need to standardize in order to ensure inter-operability.
In the early days of the World Wide Web we had similar competing standards for the distribution and sharing of information, including things like Telnet, Gopher and the early HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). While HTML quickly became the dominant standard, the individual companies which produced decoders (we call them web browsers) and encoders (we call them Web page editors) all used different standards to determine how to decode or encode the messages. In fact HTML is still implemented in a variety of ways today across different browsers – that’s why you often hear a tech geek say, well open it in a different browser, when you have trouble with seeing the content on a given web page. Adobe even has a cloud based service called Browser Lab that allows web developers preview overlays of their websites as they would appear on each of the major browsers, so that they can avoid big differences.
Plug-ins and extensions bridge the compatibility gaps
One of the big reasons plugins like Shockwave, QuickTime, Flash & Reader became so common as add on’s to a web browser, was because they could render things exactly the same way on any machine in any browser, so designers and producers preferred them because its much cheaper and more efficient to produce things one time than it is to produce them many times. The other reasons were because these plugins enabled levels of interactivity that the browsers could not.
Understanding the Why Now of HTML5
So why does that seem to be changing? Like everything, web page technology is evolving and improving. The most recent definition of Web page standards is soon going to be HTML5 (yes it isn’t really fully in place yet.) This new fifth generation of HTML (web pages) supports much deeper levels of interactivity than earlier versions. It also has better support for video, audio, animation, and interaction. So many of the things that couldn’t be done with a web page alone in the past, will soon be possible without using any kind of plugin like Flash. There are also a lot of things that still won’t be possible without that plugin, but the excitement is about the possibilities of creating more engaging content without the need for a plugin.
Now while it’s simpler to think of things in a single format and as a single output, this thinking doesn’t yet really apply well to our desktop computers the same as it does to our mobile devices. Phones have become smarter, and tablets are beginning to look and feel a lot more like computers, but the purposes and abilities of the devices are not yet really identical. So while we might imagine it would be great to just grab something from the computer and toss it to our tablet – the real experience is usually more frustrating and less plausible.
For now, we’re going to see folks keep producing content that is optimized for the desktop experience, but we’ll see an increasing desire to ensure that it will also play on mobile devices.
This change comes with a couple of big potential problems. First, virtually all of the content created for eLearning that exists today has been created and deployed using Flash technology. Regardless of whether you author your content with Captivate, Presenter or most any other technology – the output is most likely Flash. If a potential playback device doesn’t support Flash playback in a browser, then even if the new content you create is all outputting HTML5, the older content you’ve already created will still not play back on such a device. That’s nothing to shrug off. There are literally millions of course modules out there that people use every day, that are inaccessible on some mobile devices.
Now the only major playback environment that doesn’t support Flash in browser is called iOS. This is the operating system on Apple devices like the iPad, iPod and iPhone. Unfortunately for eLearning developers this is a very popular environment, so the push-pull strikes us hard here, where we either have to recreate all of our content (dating back more than a decade) or we tell our users that they cannot use these devices to access our content, or we need solutions that will help us make this content available on the iOS devices.
What should we do then?
This leads to the next potential problem. There aren’t yet any good authoring solutions for publishing to HTML5 rather than Flash, and still retaining the workflows, interactivity and other experiences that we have adopted for eLearning. There are some ways to author HTML5 content, but they are not workflows that have been customized to eLearning. The good news, there are some early contenders that are making fast progress, and that are enabling developers to continue to work in both the Flash and HTML5 environment, therein maximizing compatibility.
The Adobe Captivate Team is leading this charge. They’ve recently announced a public Beta of the Captivate SWF (Flash) to HTML5 converter. Yes, you can just click that link to download it. This amazing converter actually takes your Captivate 5.5 created flash projects and converts them into web pages that use the HTML5 standard. It is being hosted on Adobe Labs, which is a sort of test bed for Adobe projects that may or may not one day be integrated into actual products.
One of the coolest things, is that it’s totally free and you can download it already and play around with it. Another is that it makes web pages, so any content you create is yours forever – it’s just a web page after all. The first version only supported the basic workflows and elements commonly found in application capture, but at eLearning Guild’s DevLearn conference last week I was able to give folks a preview of the next version. This new version includes support for most question types (so yes, you can create quizzes in HTML5 using the Captivate 5.5 editor) and even supports integration with Scorm compliant Learning Management Systems. As far as I know this will make Captivate the first full featured eLearning editor to support quizzing and Scorm compliant reporting both in native Flash and in converted HTML5. So if you’re looking for a solution for those iOS devices today – Captivate’s new HTML5 converter is likely your best bet.
You’ll also find similar HTML5 converters from other teams at Adobe, Including an HTML5 converter for Illustrator, and HTML5 editing solutions for Dreamweaver. There is also the Wallaby project for general Flash conversion to HTML5, specializing on animation as well as the recently announced Adobe Edge. Edge and Dreamweaver are HTML5 editors for creating dynamic and engaging HTML5 content, while the others are essentially converters.
I suspect we’ll see solutions like this for a while and it’s no surprise that Adobe is leading the way with a custom HTML5 editing and creation utility like Edge which is already available for public use via labs.adobe.com. If you are familiar with After Effects or Premiere, the interface of Edge will seem pretty instantly familiar. It’s easy to use and you can build animations with relative ease.
Final reflections
HTML5 was clearly the hot topic at this year’s DevLearn conference in Las Vegas. To be honest I found it both exciting and more than a little frustrating. In the area of eLearning we’ve managed for a long time to create specialized software solutions that simplify interactive media creation for eLearning developers, Instructional Designers, and Subject Matter Experts. In my opinion, this frees trainers and learning specialists up to focus on the education rather than spending their time becoming multi-media developers.
The world of HTML has, to be honest, never done much to mitigate the technology – in fact historically HTML editors have always been very careful to always expose the code under the hood quite easily. From a media developer’s point of view, this is a big plus – it makes it easier to make small changes if something in the graphical editor isn’t behaving as needed. From an eLearning developer’s point of view – I think this presents a sizeable challenge. The balance between ease-of-use and power is a constant theme in software. I’m just a little worried that a rapid shift toward HTML5 may be an enormous shift away from the ease of use that is now very popular in eLearning authoring.
Converters of course give us an ideal ease-of-use scenario. We can just keep using our tools and convert as needed. It’s also reasonable to expect that some extant tools will at least in part support output to HTML5. Editors might be fine, but I think we’ll want to see specialized editors for eLearning, ones that accomodate our needs, and accelerate our development time-lines. For a while, we may well end up publishing two versions of things, one for general consumption and one for people on iOS devices.
We might also see the landscape (or in this case the divergent operating systems) splinter even further before standards are broadly enough adopted to move us back onto a more stable situation. Times like these are wonderful for innovation – and I expect we’ll see some exciting new ideas bubbling up. But they are also generally not at all good for steady, reliable growth. It becomes difficult to know what to expect – and you can find yourself creating or preserving content that you don’t feel certain will remain viable in 5, 10 or 15 years.
I wouldn’t expect that you’ll have serious problems or limitations with your current Flash based content, nor would I guarantee that HTML5 content will remain viable – but realistically that level of uncertainty has existed for the bast 20 years as well. Perhaps the most realistic approach is to expect the materials you create today will have a shelf life, which is likely given their content anyway.
Specific Recommendations for Action (A ToDo list for HTML5 / Mobile):
I know you all will have questions, comments and concerns as it relates to HTML5. Don’t be shy – fill the comments section below with all your ideas. Let’s get this discussion underway.
I’ve been itching to write some about the proliferation of mobile devices in the wake of Tablet computers like the Apple iPad, the Samsung Galaxy, the Blackberry Playbook and a myriad of others for quite a while. Much of what I’ve read is very technical and always seems a little heavy on hype and light on practical solutions for eLearning. The salient question is, should we as eLearning developers be looking at ways to move our content onto these mobile devices in order to more effectively reach our audience? The answer is that we of course should, but also that we are faced with a host of new challenges as soon as we attempt to do so. So in this post I’ll try to answer as much of that as I can, as objectively as I can, without getting lost in the specifics of the technology.
A little Context
First it should be noted that the idea of notebook computing didn’t originate with the iPad, it began long before with a host of solutions that attempted to offer the comfort and familiarity. The real breakthrough with the iPad is probably owed in part to a great GUI (graphical user interface) in part to aspirational marketing (it’s what the guy next to you oggles on a long flight) and in part to the availability of enough networking access to make user experiences on cloud based devices a positive experience.
In many ways notebook computing is also a terrible step backward. It doesn’t allow you to run your most used software applications, it is often slow to download and slow to perform, and it really doesn’t facilitate many of the most potent uses of the Internet because of it’s lack of in-browser Flash support. The notion that our devices and our software do this little dance of two steps forward and one step back is not at all new. We have been doing this dance for a long time. One lifelong eLearning developer infamously cracked “I could do that 20 years ago with Authorware” to virtually every “new” feature touted by various eLearning software vendors. He was of course quite correct, that we had better control of the computer years ago, and that the ongoing battle between ubiquity, accessibility, ease of use and ever-evolving hardware has often reduced the amount of control we have over the devices that display our eLearning content.
Social implications
The push-pull of technologies vs. ease of use is only one of the concerns we should examine as we consider migrating content to mobile devices and tablets. There are social considerations as well. Are we demanding too much of people? Are we introducing an expectation that they be ‘always available’ by providing technologies that facilitate constant connection?
This process, of push and pull between our desire to be free from the inherent restrictions of our technologies and our desire to take full advantage of them is a theme that has been replayed throughout the ages, even long before our technologies were digital. Certainly it’s something we see echoed in literature. Consider for example Neal Stephenson’s dystopic and all-too often prophetic novel “Snow Crash.” Stephenson describes a world that is almost inseparably chained to it’s technologies. He further extends the metaphor by introducing a notion of mental ‘programming’ and in essence makes us all the products of a vast machine.
We hear everyday in our incidental conversations the evidence that for many of us, the ‘always on’ interconnectedness of social networks, emails and web communities creates a difficult balance of welcomed interaction and unwelcome interruption. Tablets fall into this picture as a device we hope can help mediate, can make it easier to keep up with everything. They can make it easier for us to remain connected, and hopefully the software thereupon can help us filter and sort the vast array of communications we receive.
State of the dream technology
The tablets we have today, fall short of those promised us in Science fiction films and novels like Snow Crash, Minority Report or Avatar. In our imaginations and aspirations we are promised a totally mobile solution that will effortlessly enable transfer between any of our computing devices with little more than a flick of the wrist. It can be difficult to comprehend why then, we now see a technology industry that appears to be moving in the opposite direction. It appears that operating systems are splintering – and forming walls of incompatibility.
Today’s tablets do attempt to share data across devices, but generally each one prefers to lock it all into it’s own little silo. The data is often in different formats from device to device, and operating systems differ on each device making it often quite difficult to work with things in the same authoring applications across various devices. While some software companies are working actively to create cloud based application solutions, many of the creators of cloud storage systems and hardware appear to be prepping for a protocol and standards showdown. There’s nothing new in such efforts, it is in fact the way we have seen technologies evolve for ages.
The role of standards in technology adoption
Consider the historical example of Philo Farnsworth, who brought us Television. Farnsworth was only 15 when he came up with the idea for projecting television (which most then would have thought of as radio with pictures) by observing the back and forth motion of a plow tilling a field. Farnsworth and RCA, then RCA and Zenith and a variety of others would then begin a long series of law suits both to establish ownership of the invention(s) but also subsequently to establish the universal standard that would allow all televisions to receive a consistent ‘type’ of signal. Whether its VHS/Beta or TV standard A vs. TV standard B, we generally see media fall into these kinds of early disputes whenever there are encoders and decoders that need to standardize in order to ensure inter-operability.
In the early days of the World Wide Web we had similar competing standards for the distribution and sharing of information, including things like Telnet, Gopher and the early HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). While HTML quickly became the dominant standard, the individual companies which produced decoders (we call them web browsers) and encoders (we call them Web page editors) all used different standards to determine how to decode or encode the messages. In fact HTML is still implemented in a variety of ways today across different browsers – that’s why you often hear a tech geek say, well open it in a different browser, when you have trouble with seeing the content on a given web page. Adobe even has a cloud based service called Browser Lab that allows web developers preview overlays of their websites as they would appear on each of the major browsers, so that they can avoid big differences.
Plug-ins and extensions bridge the compatibility gaps
One of the big reasons plugins like Shockwave, QuickTime, Flash & Reader became so common as add on’s to a web browser, was because they could render things exactly the same way on any machine in any browser, so designers and producers preferred them because its much cheaper and more efficient to produce things one time than it is to produce them many times. The other reasons were because these plugins enabled levels of interactivity that the browsers could not.
Understanding the Why Now of HTML5
So why does that seem to be changing? Like everything, web page technology is evolving and improving. The most recent definition of Web page standards is soon going to be HTML5 (yes it isn’t really fully in place yet.) This new fifth generation of HTML (web pages) supports much deeper levels of interactivity than earlier versions. It also has better support for video, audio, animation, and interaction. So many of the things that couldn’t be done with a web page alone in the past, will soon be possible without using any kind of plugin like Flash. There are also a lot of things that still won’t be possible without that plugin, but the excitement is about the possibilities of creating more engaging content without the need for a plugin.
Now while it’s simpler to think of things in a single format and as a single output, this thinking doesn’t yet really apply well to our desktop computers the same as it does to our mobile devices. Phones have become smarter, and tablets are beginning to look and feel a lot more like computers, but the purposes and abilities of the devices are not yet really identical. So while we might imagine it would be great to just grab something from the computer and toss it to our tablet – the real experience is usually more frustrating and less plausible.
For now, we’re going to see folks keep producing content that is optimized for the desktop experience, but we’ll see an increasing desire to ensure that it will also play on mobile devices.
This change comes with a couple of big potential problems. First, virtually all of the content created for eLearning that exists today has been created and deployed using Flash technology. Regardless of whether you author your content with Captivate, Presenter or most any other technology – the output is most likely Flash. If a potential playback device doesn’t support Flash playback in a browser, then even if the new content you create is all outputting HTML5, the older content you’ve already created will still not play back on such a device. That’s nothing to shrug off. There are literally millions of course modules out there that people use every day, that are inaccessible on some mobile devices.
Now the only major playback environment that doesn’t support Flash in browser is called iOS. This is the operating system on Apple devices like the iPad, iPod and iPhone. Unfortunately for eLearning developers this is a very popular environment, so the push-pull strikes us hard here, where we either have to recreate all of our content (dating back more than a decade) or we tell our users that they cannot use these devices to access our content, or we need solutions that will help us make this content available on the iOS devices.
What should we do then?
This leads to the next potential problem. There aren’t yet any good authoring solutions for publishing to HTML5 rather than Flash, and still retaining the workflows, interactivity and other experiences that we have adopted for eLearning. There are some ways to author HTML5 content, but they are not workflows that have been customized to eLearning. The good news, there are some early contenders that are making fast progress, and that are enabling developers to continue to work in both the Flash and HTML5 environment, therein maximizing compatibility.
The Adobe Captivate Team is leading this charge. They’ve recently announced a public Beta of the Captivate SWF (Flash) to HTML5 converter. Yes, you can just click that link to download it. This amazing converter actually takes your Captivate 5.5 created flash projects and converts them into web pages that use the HTML5 standard. It is being hosted on Adobe Labs, which is a sort of test bed for Adobe projects that may or may not one day be integrated into actual products.
One of the coolest things, is that it’s totally free and you can download it already and play around with it. Another is that it makes web pages, so any content you create is yours forever – it’s just a web page after all. The first version only supported the basic workflows and elements commonly found in application capture, but at eLearning Guild’s DevLearn conference last week I was able to give folks a preview of the next version. This new version includes support for most question types (so yes, you can create quizzes in HTML5 using the Captivate 5.5 editor) and even supports integration with Scorm compliant Learning Management Systems. As far as I know this will make Captivate the first full featured eLearning editor to support quizzing and Scorm compliant reporting both in native Flash and in converted HTML5. So if you’re looking for a solution for those iOS devices today – Captivate’s new HTML5 converter is likely your best bet.
You’ll also find similar HTML5 converters from other teams at Adobe, Including an HTML5 converter for Illustrator, and HTML5 editing solutions for Dreamweaver. There is also the Wallaby project for general Flash conversion to HTML5, specializing on animation as well as the recently announced Adobe Edge. Edge and Dreamweaver are HTML5 editors for creating dynamic and engaging HTML5 content, while the others are essentially converters.
I suspect we’ll see solutions like this for a while and it’s no surprise that Adobe is leading the way with a custom HTML5 editing and creation utility like Edge which is already available for public use via labs.adobe.com. If you are familiar with After Effects or Premiere, the interface of Edge will seem pretty instantly familiar. It’s easy to use and you can build animations with relative ease.
Final reflections
HTML5 was clearly the hot topic at this year’s DevLearn conference in Las Vegas. To be honest I found it both exciting and more than a little frustrating. In the area of eLearning we’ve managed for a long time to create specialized software solutions that simplify interactive media creation for eLearning developers, Instructional Designers, and Subject Matter Experts. In my opinion, this frees trainers and learning specialists up to focus on the education rather than spending their time becoming multi-media developers.
The world of HTML has, to be honest, never done much to mitigate the technology – in fact historically HTML editors have always been very careful to always expose the code under the hood quite easily. From a media developer’s point of view, this is a big plus – it makes it easier to make small changes if something in the graphical editor isn’t behaving as needed. From an eLearning developer’s point of view – I think this presents a sizeable challenge. The balance between ease-of-use and power is a constant theme in software. I’m just a little worried that a rapid shift toward HTML5 may be an enormous shift away from the ease of use that is now very popular in eLearning authoring.
Converters of course give us an ideal ease-of-use scenario. We can just keep using our tools and convert as needed. It’s also reasonable to expect that some extant tools will at least in part support output to HTML5. Editors might be fine, but I think we’ll want to see specialized editors for eLearning, ones that accomodate our needs, and accelerate our development time-lines. For a while, we may well end up publishing two versions of things, one for general consumption and one for people on iOS devices.
We might also see the landscape (or in this case the divergent operating systems) splinter even further before standards are broadly enough adopted to move us back onto a more stable situation. Times like these are wonderful for innovation – and I expect we’ll see some exciting new ideas bubbling up. But they are also generally not at all good for steady, reliable growth. It becomes difficult to know what to expect – and you can find yourself creating or preserving content that you don’t feel certain will remain viable in 5, 10 or 15 years.
I wouldn’t expect that you’ll have serious problems or limitations with your current Flash based content, nor would I guarantee that HTML5 content will remain viable – but realistically that level of uncertainty has existed for the bast 20 years as well. Perhaps the most realistic approach is to expect the materials you create today will have a shelf life, which is likely given their content anyway.
Specific Recommendations for Action (A ToDo list for HTML5 / Mobile):
I know you all will have questions, comments and concerns as it relates to HTML5. Don’t be shy – fill the comments section below with all your ideas. Let’s get this discussion underway.
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