Yes, I’ve not been blogging as regularly as I might have liked to. I’ve been busy with projects – bread and butter.

We’ve always focused on instructional design being essential to the design of courseware. That’s certainly true, it’s the first step to make a learning solution instructionally sound. The next in line is to make it interesting, engaging, interactive. Too many solutions fail at that crucial stage. I’ve seen too many hours of what is commonly termed ‘shovelware’ that result from this failure.

Previously when I discussed freeform and template-based rapid content authoring tools, I kept software simulation tools aside.

The main reason was that such simulation tools are not always used for developing just any type of learning but focused on training content creation for a specific software application or system.

A nice talk about the need for a ‘learning revolution’. Sir Ken Robinson makes some cutting comments about education today. Poignant at times, funny at some – well worth the 17 minutes.

“…teenagers do not wear wrist watches, I don’t mean they can’t or they’re not allowed to, they just often choose not to. And the reason is you see, we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us above 25 and so for us, if you want to tell the time you have to wear something.

Going through my feeds yesterday, I came across this great post by Cathy Moore titled – “How to design eLearning thats memorable and budget friendly”. In this, she has included a 5-part video series from her presentation at the UK eLearning Network earlier this month.

Just before I went on holiday recently I was asked how human learning has changed with the advent, penetration and increasing ubiquity of computing technology.

My answer was simple – it hasn’t.

Human learning hasn’t fundamentally changed over the last fifty years. Our ability to learn is something honed over several hundred millennia, it’s what set us apart from the primates in the first place.

At Google I/O event last year HTML 5 capabilities were demonstrated to developers for the first time. This year at the Google I/O some important announcements have been made which will make HTML 5 development easier across different browsers.  

On day 1 of the I/O Google has made many announcements like release of open source, royalty-free video format WebM, Chrome Web store, opened up Google Wave, released open source Font API and directory etc.

ID is an interesting domain to be involved in. On the one hand, you are continuously learning about different work environments as you are called upon to resolve different performance issues. On the other hand, your understanding of the domain, and your role in it, changes over time.

As an instructional designer, you start by learning a whole lot of theories and models.

While working on rapid authored courses (courses authored using rapid authoring tools), I often encounter the decision point of whether to use freeform rapid authoring tools or the traditional template-based tools. Both have their own pros and cons. In this post, I attempt to discuss more on these.

Last year, we mentioned that there is a time and place for rapid authoring while opting for it.

Adobe recently released eLearning Suite 2 comprising of Captivate 5, Flash Professional CS5, Dreamweaver CS5, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Acrobat 9 Pro, Presenter 7 (available on Windows only), Soundbooth CS5, Bridge CS5, Device Central CS5 in it. One of the most significant improvements in this version is the availability of Captivate 5 for both Windows and Mac OS platforms previously it was only available for Windows users.  (Thankfully, Adobe Apple fight is not affecting everything)

eLearning Network today released the below graphic providing some stats about the US eLearning market in 2009.

Last week, while justifying Apple’s refusal to allow Flash player on iPhone/iPad, Steve Jobs wrote– “New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too)”. A few days before the launch of iPad Apple had released a list of ‘iPad ready’ websites having support for HTML5. Clearly Apple is backing HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript for developing future web applications.

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

Earlier this morning, I was trawling through my feeds and came across this interesting post on Cathy Moore’s blog. She points to a really great example of a branching scenario, an activity called ‘Connect with Haji Kamal‘. The online scenario is the homework part of a lesson plan that includes in-class discussion about how to build rapport across cultures; part of a larger toolkit for military educators to strengthen soldiers’ cross-cultural and peacekeeping skills.