Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

This is a work in progress. Uli and I are invited to do a pre-conference workshop in collaboration with friends from SURF, Netherlands at this year's Educause in Seattle a week from now. It is a continuing workshop from our last year's Educause pre-con workshop on Pachyderm. The workshop on our side will be covering concept mapping tools and rich media. We will introduce a new tool which will convert Pachyderm presentations into standard concept mapping XML and then one can use open source concept mapping tools such as VUE to outline the entire Pachyderm presentation or even browse through them screen by screen!

The simple reason behind this is because Pachyderm presentations are hardly linear, the object oriented designs can easily get the learners (even the designers themselves sometimes). Therefore, a tool to sketch out the package outline (like a site map for a site) is very much needed. In order to demonstrate the tool, we created a Pachyderm presentation on Arts Metaverse which we will be handing out to the workshop participants and ask them browse through the presentation. Then we will ask them to use the tool and convert the presentation into a concept map to see if it would help them to further understand the topic. As I said, it's a work in progress. But feel free to check out the Pachyderm presentation on Arts Metaverse and Ancient Spaces. Stay tuned for further information.

UPDATE: Click here for FLASH PLAYER 9 OFFICIAL ROLL OUT!

Yes! The most recent Flash Player beta (version 9.0.7) fully supports Pachyderm presentations! PHEW, what a release... Flash Player 9.0.5 almost gave me a heart attack when it came out because Pachyderm layout scripts just didn't get compiled and all assets get scrambled to the top left hand corner (0, 0)! Anyway, I am just glad the new Player 9 beta works with Pachyderm seamlessly. According to the Flash developers' community, this version (9.0.7) should be the last beta version before the official Flash Player 9 comes out! YAY!!!

Today we installed Flash Player 7 for Pocket PC on Uli's new toy - UTStarcom 6700. It is a pocket PC phone that comes with MS mobile 5.0. The phone has a fairly large touch screen (Vivid 2.8" diagonal, 65K-colour TFT LCD) and a 1.3 megapixel digital camera. The processor speed is 416 MHz, 64 MB of ROM (extendable) and 128 MB RAM.

After the installation, we tested 4 Learning Tools and 3 Pachyderm presentations on this device, guess what? All showed up beautifully in both vertical display mode and horizontal display mode. The learning tools we have tested with the phone are: Timeline tool, Multimedia Learning Object Authoring tool, Character Stroke Recorder tool and Flash Card Tool(Mobile Version). The tests were conducted in the alive mode (no cached or physical files, browsed to the real websites using UBC Campus wireless connection with VPN). Here are a couple of screen shots:

Pachyderm on Pocket PC Phone

Flash Card Pocket PC Edition

Very exciting stuff! One thing noticed is that Pachyderm needs a mobile version due to the screen size makes the text in the presentations un-readable. But overall, the navigation, xml parsing and UI layout all passed the test! Those of you with a PDA, check them out! It's time for some mobile learning (visually).

Just like I thought yesterday, spent more time today on the Pachyderm presentation show cases. The following are the ones I have browsed today, spent over 1 hr on these. I love them all, check them out yourself.

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

1. Arkansas Air Museum
2. How to Write a Great Paper
3. Making Sense of Modern Art
4. Still Life Observational Exercise
5. The Case of the Bony Defect
6. The Inner Beauty of Bugs
7. Virtual Reality and Visual Perception

Upon the finishing of Pachyderm beta stage, the team has selected a group of beautiful Pachyderm presentations to show you. The contents in these presentations are quite diversed so that you can get a different inspiration from each one of them. The topics cover from mesum collections to learning how to write. I have just spent 40 minutes of my Saturday afternoon going through a few of them and yet planning to see the rest tomorrow!

Seriously, go check them out!!!

These are the ones I have seen:

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

1. Pachyderms on Parade (SFMOMA)
2. Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (Glenbow Meseum; Good job D'Arcy!)
3. Technologies for Learning (Santa Clara University)
4. Get Smart with Art
5. Women Nobel Prize Winners

Now you can create your own frame for your Pachyderm presentations! Here is how:
1. Goto http://ccw.arts.ubc.ca/pfe/
2. As a first time user, follow the link at bottom: "If you are a new user to Pachyderm frame editor, *Enter Here*".
3. Next page, your Pachyderm frame folder is created. You may write down the unique Pachyderm frame ID for future reference. Follow the link to continue.
4. You may add text, image to the stage, adjust text font, size, color, adjust image size. Select an image or text block by mouse click on them. The size adjusting button is a small square that will appear when the object is selected, drag this box to adjust the size. Also when an object is selected, you can move an object by dragging them. you remove it from the stage by click on remove, and add or remove a URL link associated with the object.
5. You may change the color of the Pachyderm stage background and the navigation button.
6. You may name your Pachyderm frame setting and click on save to save your configuration.
7. After it is saved, you may take a look at the xml data file, continue to work on frame editing, or publish the frame.
8. Once the frame is published, you can download the zip file, and view the frame setting in flash file root_border.swf.

Pachyderm 1.0 was constructed based on Flash 5 technology and html tags were not well supported back then. Over the last few years, Macromedia has made many improvements over this issue. HTML tags can now be freely and safely parsed to any dynamic text fields. Upon the delivery of Pachyderm 2.0 re-coded templates, we are now "turning on" the HTML tag support switches for the text fields in all Pachyderm 2.0 implementation.

One challenge we have had is that Pachyderm uses XML files to store all dynamic data. When the author includes standard HTML tags in the text information, the tag "" is first converted into "&#60b&#62", then stored into the XML file for the data constancy. We have constructed a "field switch" to allow the dynamic text fields to parse the correct HTML tags. So far this method is working great. The result is quite impressive. However Larry Johnson noticed that the "" tag does not change the font into standard navy blue color with the underline. However, he has figured a work around by using html code to convert the link text into blue and underlined. The result? Makes you want to click on it!

pachyderm.org is now the official site for the Pachyderm project. For more information, goto the site and check it out.

Just found this out today, Horizon Wimba acquired the assets of Silicon Chalk at the beginning of this month. Silicon Chalk is a Vancouver-based company that creates software which, from within a class, broadcasts an instructor’s prepared notes and lecture materials to local and remote students. It's founder - Murray Goldberg is also the founder of WebCT. Kudos to Murray's team. Once again, he created an innovative yet fully marketable software.

Quotes from Rachel Smith at NMC,

"Pachyderm 2.0 is in beta, and we are actively seeking beta testers! We're looking for people to help us spot usability issues and bugs before the Pachyderm multimedia authoring tool is released this fall. Beta testers will become part of the Pachyderm community and will help shape the final form of this exciting content development platform. To register as a beta tester, please use the form located at this URL:

http://www.nmc.org/pachyderm/betasignup.shtml

Testers will be divided into three groups, with the first group beginning testing in April. The second group will begin testing in May, and the third in July.

About the Pachyderm 2.0 Project

The Pachyderm 2.0 Project is a partnership led by NMC and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The project brings software development teams and digital library experts from six NMC universities together with counterparts from five major museums to create a new, open-source authoring environment for creators of web-based and multimedia learning experiences. The new tool will be based on Pachyderm, the authoring and publishing tool developed by SFMOMA to author its successful series, Making Sense of Modern Art."

Just trying to spread the words around. Check out this creative project!

Everyone is sick at work, including myself. A mixed flu and spring allergy (since Vancouver is having some warm weather recently).

Had some interesting challenges while experimenting with Flash mix with video / audio data. This is related to an international project (Pachyderm) me and my co-worker is involved in. The project requires the flash interface to be able to load and control different types of media files on the fly. The media files vary from swf to mpeg video data, mp3 to wav and aiff sound files. Due to the nature of Flash has different ways of loading different file types: loadMovie() and loadSound(), importing video files and “squeeze” them in Sorenson compression or linking to them externally, video objects and audio objects etc… The trick lies in there must be a “Player Selector” component to be in place to first identify the file type based on the XML attributes and then determine the right loading functions and control components. Anyway, it was a good day in Flash development, looking forward to test some new features in Flash 8.