http://mobilemind.net/2008/07/ping-pong-with-brooks-clarifying-that.html

I encourage everyone to check it out and get engaged.

How the heck did I miss this post when you first wrote it? :) Thanks for the props for Singularity.

I just have to clarify that Singularity is not an online conference, it’s a _global_ conference. The big difference here is that we have local conference hubs around the world, some being organized by venue sponsors like Yahoo! and the BBC and others — community hubs — being organized by community groups. People meet up _locally_ as part of a global event.

We definitely use the Internet but it’s our communication medium. It’s what ties all the local groups together. Sure there will be people experiencing and interacting with the conference from the comfort of their own rooms — and some speakers will even be presenting from whichever hotel room they happen to be at the moment — but we are concentrating heavily on having a good speaker and audience presence at the various local hubs. I feel this is essential to the character of the conference.

I truly feel that we are traversing some uncharted terrain here, building the first Conference 2.0, as it were. And I hope that other conferences follow suit because the type of conference we’re creating is environmentally friendly.

Brooks, by the way, expect an email from me very soon. I want to talk to you guys about getting you involved with the conference :)

http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2008/07/17/why-elearning-is-dead/

Regarding ‘over-engineered junk’– I’d agree everyone wants simplicity, but they also want both power and flexibility– and they don’t get active in the process of the specs. Criticism is easier work. Someone trying to get code to work with a spec just dropped in their lap or levied on them is never going to like it– regardless of the simplicity.

Are traffic laws completely broke because a visit to the licensing bureau is a bad experience, drivers change lanes without signaling or speed, or poorly designed intersections back-up? I think the regulations, agency, and enforcement are good (except when it takes my time or I get pulled over). I think there is parallel to consider there.

It takes effort as well as intelligence to implement a spec from scratch. Once in Vienna, I met an Italian speaker who found the AICC spec online and managed/wrote a compatible LMS with no outside help. AICC is a far simpler spec. I’ve seen non-browser based content that implements AICC content communication. I’ll go on record that at the higher implementation levels of the spec, AICC packaging and course structure is unnecessarily complex, but the entry levels are magnitudes of order easier than SCORM. I’ve successfully hand coded many AICC Course Interchange file sets from Excel or Notepad. I wouldn’t dare try that with SCORM.

Maybe a bigger challenge is e-learning design– poor instructional strategy decisions are amplified, not eliminated by elearning and an LMS. I think there is too much stuff forced into an LMS that is poorly designed/built, shouldn’t even be elearning or shouldn’t be in an LMS in the first place.

Content too can be over-engineered, I’ve seen people attempt overly complex Simple Sequencing that cries out for 30 minutes with a human instructor in the loop instead. ISD can get simpler too, not just specs.

Content also gets under-designed, under-funded and can have poor workmanship. It pains me to take mandated training at a big company and see it is called e-learning and it is LITERALLY A PPT that I read to myself followed by a ‘performance assessment’ of 6 questions to which the answers are either ‘B’ ‘All of the above’ or ‘False’. At least they only wasted every learners time instead of also wasting resource on production materials and ISD.

Ok, now I’m ranting too. :-)

Adobe didn’t bring Microsoft into the picture as it would give away their strategy around SEO and Flash so they played it safe focused on Google and brought Yahoo! along for the ride, to kind of throw the journos of the scent.

Microsoft said “No comment”, smart, as when you think about what happened, basically nothing. Cool heads in the room will soon realize that Adobe came out and said “we just gave Google the keys to our Flash Player source code for a fee (yes money changed hands); it now has the ability to attempt to simulate user interaction via server farms. As for what it does beyond that, we won’t say as that gives away the secret sauce right now”.

This entire theory is flawed as firstly Adobe’s sales pitch is that to get the content the best idea is to take years of legacy SWF files and allow Google to burrow its way through the user interface, automatically decide what’s important vs. what isn’t and then store such data into their cloud servers. Anyone else get an uneasy feeling about that this? A bot deciding semantic weighting based of an unstructured format?

Then when a user comes to search for “Honda Civic” it somehow knows to not only take them to that point in time where Google found the relevant area for the Honda Civic but somehow resumes state for the end user, in other words - where the hell is Deep Linking Adobe. Oh wait thats coming in the Tools right? This is such a setup.

Deep Linking you say? Oh wait that’s optional.

Industry Analysts, do you freaking jobs and start to tear this buzz apart as the inflated hype that it is. There is so many flaws in this burrow through the code to get to the source that any idiot with half a brain can see it for what it is. Adobe over-promising an under delivering as per usual.