Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

I haven't had much time to post lately due to projects are piling up at work. One of them is a cross-institutional online course between UBC and University of Melbourne. The course provides students the opportunity for comparative inquiry of Indigenous experiences of colonization and the manifestations of that experience in the contemporary socio-cultural environment. Through the use of digital interactive technologies like Flash and Immersive 3D platforms, students will have the opportunity to engage in authentic learning. Compare to the past mixed-mode courses, this one is more challenging due to the aspect that many of the subject matter experts are in the remote places. We must rely on video conferencing and project management tools to pull things together. So far, the team members are pretty happy with Skype and Basecamp. There are many exciting modules in this course are under-development: Flash based games, 3D re-construction of residential school, collections of multimedia elements and much more. So, stay tuned...

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.

From Brent's Blog, eXe version 0.10 is released today. This release is a remarkable milestone of the project. The current version uses TinyMCE as a rich text editor which has some great WYSIWYG features. eXe 0.10 comes with multiple language interfaces such as English, German, Chinese, Greek and Spanish. There is also an experimental Cloze iDevice as well as the External Web Site idevice. There is yet more exciting improvements coming in the following months.

Here is a wiki on iDevice.

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!

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.

Have not used Macromedia Director for formal project development since version 7. Played with version 8 very briefly when shockwave 3d was introduced. I was helping a colleague (John Bratlien) in the last few days to finish a project on delivering 3D models with photographic textures via web browsers. The project was initiated by an Adobe Atmosphere grant. Atmosphere was a new application by Adobe to implement interactive 3D applications on the web. The program and browser plug-in was quite solid except lack of cross-platform support. For unknown reasons, Adobe decided to discontinue the product in the New Year. My colleague then turned to Java to seek for further solutions in delivering 3D objects with OpenGL support through a web interface. Due to a tight deadline, we decided to give Director MX a try. Quite amazingly, Shockwave 3D and director lingo made the project development so simple and we successfully delivered the demo product to the faculty member on Thursday evening. Due to further development is needed for the project, I will leave the detailed descriptions to later posts, but for those of you who are still frustrated with the discontinuation of Atmosphere, give Macromedia Director MX (or Diector MX 2004) a try, it may just save you some time. [to be continued...]