Month: November 2012

The Usability of Windows 8

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Just finished reading a fairly devastating review of Windows 8 by Jakob Nielsen. I have to wonder if some of the choices they made in designing the interface were forced because of patent considerations, considering all the air has been sucked out of the room in that regard by Apple.

Worth a read, if you are wondering what to expect of a tablet interface that has been shoehorned onto a PC. Perhaps it will make more sense if they start selling 70″ touch screen high-performance tablet PCs. We’ll all work standing up next to the wall or something, waving our arms. It will be better for our figures, at least.

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Thoughts on the TinCan API after a week with hands-on.

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The Tin Can API (Experience API ) is the next generation evolution of the SCORM elearning standard, but it does far more than simply improve SCORM.

Although the immediate benefit for the health care organization I work for will come from the elimination of some of the technical limitations of SCORM, the main point is the thoroughly transformative nature of Tin Can. It will take years to demonstrate how deep the rabbit hole goes. But I can tell you the direction it is heading right now:

We’re out of the learning management business and into the big-data business.

The infrastructure for figuring out “what really works” is now here. The infrastructure for relating actions to outcomes is here. Assuming, of course, infinite access to all possible sources of data everywhere, we could now ask questions like:

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Adobe Captivate

Getting and setting data from Captivate 6 for custom integrations

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We use Captivate with our LMS both as standalone SCORM modules that communicate directly with the LMS, and as embedded quizzes inside custom learning modules. Communication of the Captivate score back to the learning module was done using a trick suggested by Adobe’s Andrew Chemey which involved redefining the built-in sendMail function Captivate used to send an email report of the quiz results.

Captivate 6 removed the built-in email functions, so we’re now using the very powerful Captivate API to do the same thing. The new API is very powerful and makes it much easier to get and set variables from outside the Captivate, using javascript.

Here’s how to get started:

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