Author: ellen

Clarke’s law # 3 in action – Shazam, an amazing iPhone app!

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Shazam
Shazam Listening to a tune

I just got my mind blown by “Shazam”, a new FREE application for the iPhone. Shazam uses the iPhones microphone to listen to songs or music happening anywhere in earshot. It will then tell you what song you are listening to.

Just click “Tag it” and point the mic end of the phone in the general direction of the sound. It twirls for a while, then reports back, usually extremely accurately what song you were listening to.

IMG_0007.PNG
Shazam sending song info to the web for processing.

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SCORM 2.0 workshop

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The SCORM Workshop held by LETSI (Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability) is over, and some clear direction emerged from the blizzard of whitepapers, informal submissions and comments over the last few months. I was very impressed by how fast they moved things forward in a few days.

The design process will be driven by use cases generated by the people who actually use SCORM applications in their work: Instructional designers, administrators, teachers, and other strategic adopters all over the world. This is significantly different from the way SCORM was originally designed, by a small community of LMS vendors and the U.S. Department of Defense, one of the BIG USERS of training and tracking.

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Update on Autism research

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Although repeated studies show little or no correlation between vaccination with the MMR vaccine and the onset of autism, there is a lot of popular support for the idea that there is some causal link. Originally the use of mercury in the form of thiomersal in vaccines was suggested as the culprit, but this seems less likely since mercury was removed from vaccines in North America and Europe by 2001 and the incidence of Autism continued to rise

Still many people remain unconvinced there is NO link between vaccination and autism, despite all the negative results, so other ideas have been floated. These include:

  • Some children’s immune systems may be predisposed to be overwhelmed by the combination vaccines, and they develop high fevers and sometimes febrile seizures which cause or contribute to the onset of autism.
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    • A SCORM-ready template: Part 2E. Add the video player to your learning module

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    If you are in a hurry, here are two ready-to-use pieces of player code to choose from. All you need to do is choose one, edit a few lines and drop the code into your page. You will need a playlist for both of them, although it can be very simple for the single file player. Save the playlist to the media folder (there is probably a sample one there already in newer modules).

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    A SCORM-ready template: Part 2A. Add Flash Video to your learning module

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    What files are required to add video to your learning module?

    The player we are using for embedding streaming media into the SCORM template. is the Jeroen Wigering media player. Some of the necessary files are already included in the template and do not need to be touched:

    1. includes/mediaPlayer.swf (already included in template)
      this file generates the player according to the settings you include in the content page.
      mediaPlayer
    2. js/swfObject.js (see for more info on swfObject
      this file contains the code necessary to avoid the ActiveX problem with embedded SWFs in Internet Explorer, and generates embed code used by other browsers. A reference to this file already exists in the head of each module page, so you do not need to include it again.
      swfObject
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