EduTechnorama » Adobe

Long Overdue Updates

Jeffrey — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:13:17 +0000

For anyone who had been reading this blog, I’m addressing this to you and new readers as well. To make matters short, I’ve been fully recovered from my health issues this year. It still amazes me what it took to get from Point A to Point B and all the people involved. As part of this everyone should know that I’ve actually been back at work since the end of April when my radiation therapy was finished. Shortly thereafter I was admitted to the Center for Transitional Neurorehabilitation for evaluation for their program. What a difficult and amazing process that was. Very self-revealing too. I worked with several different facets and therapists each dedicated to their own specialties in identifying areas where in my humble unprofessional opinion the average non-neurologically-compromised individual could benefit and improve. Here’s where the rubber met the road:

Neuropsychology - (To check my mood during my treatment. I think I did okay with this as it was but it’s part of the program for just about everyone)
Occupational Therapy (To be sure my day-to-day activities and responsiblities could be maximized and potential compensations for any supposed or indentified deficiencies be brought forth)
Physical Therapy (To be sure my energy level and my body was performing as normally as possible)
Speech and Language Therapy (To help in areas related to visual scanning, language processing, and deductive reasoning) In actuality my OT and SLT sessions sometimes overlapped and my therapists threw several curve balls my way to be sure I could reach my fullest potential. As self-revealing as that was, it was very effective

There were other experiences that led up to this point in time, but suffice it to say, I’ve been performing well. My supervisor and co-workers have been very supportive. My clientele routinely tell me they can’t tell me any difference in my personality. That’s an inside-the-box, vs. outside-the-box perspective issue. The charts and graphs of my cognitive rehabilitation exercises show that considerable progress was made. In order to justify considerable, the tasks that patients in this program all go through include doing paper-pencil exercises and other tasks that stretch and bend your mind so that new neural pathways can be made and if not, what compensations could be made.

As part of all this, one of my new side-projects I’m taking on is to take some of the assessment tools and exercises I was given as paper-pencil tests and try to digitize them into programs that anyone can do online at home. My platform of choice is likely going to be Adobe Flex/AIR as that is what I’m most familiar with. I’ll keep everyone updated as I progress.

New Projects

Jeffrey — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:34:05 +0000

I’m always one of the first to admit that instructional technology production and delivery theories evolve yet never die, and the technology used to promote these theories is ALWAYS evolving. Sometimes so fast that I can’t keep up. Since I prefer to interact with people first and focus on technology secondly, a lot of my work is geared towards meeting the needs of people who need to learn technology.

With that said, I’m gearing up for a new project that will involve my commitment to the Adobe Education Champions group (E-Champions) to utilize their ‘gift’ of a Connect Pro account so I can begin sharing with the ed tech developer community some of the techy things that apply to what they might be learning theory-wise.

I’m calling this my edutechie corner and someday soon I will have a series of screencasts that showcase some of the Adobe Creative Tecnology software suites.

Details will be forthcoming…

In the meantime, here’s an idea using some of the methods that Adobe itself is pushing in the next generation of designer and developer workflows using one of my more favorite tools: Fireworks:

Collaborative Spaces

Jeffrey — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:06:41 +0000

Adobe has launched a free collaborative workspace (currently in beta at this time) that allows for you to share and link embeddable files from your documents to blog posts and other learning environments that accept HTML. For instance here is a PDF document:

Screens Everywhere

Jeffrey — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:42:22 +0000

I’d like you to meet someone:

This is Sarah Outwater, a young woman who has been blind since she was 3 years old. She’s a cancer survivor (metastatic retinoblastoma) and has been in her condition ever since she had surgery on her eyes to protect her from the deadly disease.

I was invited to participate in a charity project for a little girl she had heard of on the news who was in a similar condition as she was at her age, except technology has advanced and this little girl (last I heard) was free of her cancer and still able to see.

Sarah is an extremely intelligent girl and can play several different musical instruments and uses technology to support her education and professional career goals. In her charity project, she was compiling a music album and asking for donations to help the family of the girl who was receiving cancer treatments. As part of my donation, I offered to build a web site and create/donate some multimedia presentations for benefit concerts and post them on the website (This was before I heard of YouTube). Sarah brought her laptop to my workplace and we cut some video interviews together and I showed her how to edit content for the website. Later we were joking together in a group meeting about how people and technology interact. I made the quip that people who talk to their technology to get it to do obscure things are borderline bonkers, and she retorted "well that’s nothing. My technology talks to me!"

Of course it was true. In our interactions for her laptop was equipped with screen reading technology that allowed her to complete her work for school and work on her music projects. This is a prime example of adaptive use of technology for a population that predominantly gets their work done despite the fact that they can’t see what they are doing.

However, that’s not the only way people who can’t make use of their eyes to do their work continue to survive. They must be able to use their other senses. Audio alone in my humble opinion is not the savior of interaction with technology. People must be able to use their other senses too. Which of the remaining 4 senses makes the most sense for HCI for blind people? Touch or tactile surfaces is what’s coming to mind.

Here is something that Macrodobia (Adobe the company and Macromedia‘s Technology) have been pushing for a while…the idea that consistent technology for authoring multimedia content be available on a multitude of devices. What this means is that soon someday we will be seeing flash on tons of personal handheld devices.

I also suspect we will see flash interfaces on other devices too such as kitchen appliances and home entertainment center components. Even more sobering would be to see it in public facilities and transportation devices such as elevators.

Adobe is really pushing their flash platform which is really good for people like me who enjoy learning about their platform. What I would really like to see is an concerted effort to research what accessibility options exist for persons who can’t use their eyes to interact with interfaces that will potentially be flat and non-tactile.

Even Apple’s iPhone with all its glitz and glory has its issues. How does a person who can’t see be excited about an iPhone for their communication needs? Sarah had no problem using her cell phone to communicate, and could very easily find the buttons to push because she could feel them with her fingers. Voice activation is probably on the horizon and may become mandatory for devices using these interfaces, and I will be waiting to see what advances are on their way with Adobe’s technology.

The end result?

Jeffrey — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:59:42 +0000

Okay with the mess that getting wordpress to properly store formatted code out of the way, the end result to my project working for Dr. Nelson ends up being something like this:

Simlandia Bot Skin

I do have to report that it was fun working with Dr. Nelson. In the midst of our busy schedules it was easier sometimes for me to show him what I was working on by creating an object that he could pretend was a bot and known only to him so it wouldn’t interfere with any of the other participants involved in the study. So I tried to pick something rather inconspicuous, like a garbage can…(I mean who wants to interact with a virtual garbage can?)

So I created the garbage can object and placed it in a super secret location known to only us. It has sort of become the secret easter egg in the environment:

I always wanted to be behind the scenes of making a secret easter egg. Now I have my wish. If for some reason a student involved in the study reads this, see if you can find the scene located above and click on the garbage can. See what you think!

Using an XML Configuration File for Flex

Jeffrey — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:46:46 +0000

Okay, if you are a new Flex developer in training and are going to use a configuration file for your appliation, you might be tempted as I was to do it all in Actionscript code using the URLLoader class. While you can do this, it takes a lot of elbow grease to get the timing just right.

My best experience was using the tag to load the configuration file and process it into the e4x parsing model as shown:

Let's say you have the following configuration file:

PLAIN TEXT

XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>
>Andy Richards>
>andyRichards.gif>
>insideRoomTablesBed>
>

Now you want to read that in and assign the contents of each node to a configuration settings object:

PLAIN TEXT

Actionscript:

/*
ConfigSettings.as
ConfigSettings class defines a custom object for
parsing a configuration xml file and distributing the
nodes to fields of the object so they are easily accessible to
the main Flex Application.
*/
package edu.asu.simlandia {
public class ConfigSettings {
private var _botName:String;
private var _botImage:String;
private var _backgroundStyle:String;
private var xmlDoc:XML;
public function get botName():String {
return this._botName;
}
public function get botImage():String {
return this._botImage;
}
public function get backgroundStyle():String {
return this._backgroundStyle;
}
public function ConfigSettings():void {
this._interactions = new Array();
}
public function set botName(value:String):void {
this._botName = value;
}
public function set botImage(value:String):void {
this._botImage = value;
}
public function set backgroundStyle(value:String):void {
this._backgroundStyle = value;
}
/*
Function responsible for loading the configuration file,
parsing it, and assigning the text properties to the
configuration object
*/
public function loadData(xmlData:XML):void {
this.xmlDoc = xmlData;
this.botImage = this.xmlDoc.picture;
this.botName = this.xmlDoc.botname;
this.backgroundStyle = this.xmlDoc.backgroundStyle;
}
}
}

Use the following MXML code to do it:

PLAIN TEXT

XML:

:Application
xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
layout="absolute" backgroundColor="#CCCC99"
creationComplete="configService.send()">
:Script>
import edu.asu.simlandia.*;
import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
private var settings:ConfigSettings;
private var configXML:XML;
private function configure(event:ResultEvent):void {
settings = new ConfigSettings();
settings.loadData(this.configXML);
this.botName = this.settings.botName;
this.botImage = "images/" + this.settings.botImage;
this.styleName = this.settings.backgroundStyle;
}
]]>
:Script>
:HTTPService url="configFile.xml" id="configService" resultFormat="e4x" result="configure(event)"/>
:Application>

Doing Things the Right Way

Jeffrey — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:18:47 +0000

Most of my posts on this site have been journalistic in nature, and that's the intent during this time in my education and work. However I do want to explore the new and exciting technologies that educational software development has to offer. That's why I'm posting as part of the contribution to the Flex community.

I'm also about to finish up my final paper for my EDT591 class, and I need some typing to get in the writer's mood.

As part of my experience being away from MCC for the semester, I was somewhat worried that I would have too much time on my hands. Quite the contrary; it has been just the right amount of time and every day there was something new to learn.

One of the things I did was contribute to an e-learning project using an Adobe Flex project, in a way that I wouldn't have thought at the start of it. Dr. Brian Nelson's area of focus is interactive multi-user virtual educational environments or MUVEE's. Many of people who are practitioners in Ed Tech seem to always going for the latest tactic or invention. Given past experience, I'm always willing to try things out for the sake of trying, but I don't always agree with how effective they are in the end. I'm speaking about SecondLife by Linden Labs. Many universities are opening up virtual campuses and allowing users to participate in those environment for a slew of educational experiences. The value of learning this way has merits, but as for myself I refuse to go in there and prefer to watch others. Reality as far as education is concerned as challenging as it is, is my best friend.

What I do like about Dr. Nelson's MUVEE's project(s) is that they are actually lab-tested and verified means of whether or not learning is achieved by way of learner participation using a virtual environment as a tool.

When I was picking the classes I would need to graduate, one of them fell through. I was already pursuing the idea of a graduate assistantship since I thought I would need to fill up the time. In the end, Dr. Nelson was able to get me to work on his project as a volunteer and have it count towards my final credit for graduation, so I got involved with his Simlandia project, which is using the ActiveWorlds browser retooled as an educational environment.

What this environment does is allow participants to collaboratively work together to solve a scientific problem. Other graduate students have been running sessions where participants involved are observed while they interact in small teams and communicate with each other using several modes. This semeseter, the mode of communication was VoIP using Skype.

Where I got to really help out was the way that the participants interact with the Bots (non player computer controlled characters) who gave out clues and hints to solving the problem. Dr. Nelson and the other grad students want to investigate the proximity effect with learning, buy putting all relevant learning content in one browser pane window. Right now the only way to interact with a bot character is to right-click on them using your mouse, and choosing from a menu of possible interactions.

What is better in our eyes is single left clicking on the bot character in question and you get a new page designed solely for interacting with the Bot.

In the end you get a page with a Flex application (which I built from scratch), and provides a learner with a new interface to interact with the bot.

In the process of doing so, (I was teaching myself the ins and outs of Flex integration using a proprietary environment) I learned some good do's and dont's when it comes to writing Flex code. For the sake of containment and usability, my next post will contain the common procedures that will be of most use to other people learning Flex.

Rapid Prototyping for E-Learning

Jeffrey — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:52:57 +0000

In the presentation I gave for my Current Ed Tech Trends course topic earlier this year, I had mentioned the fact that the development of the Graphical User Interface made the transition from entering commands via a keyboard from a cognitive process (knowing and typing) to a more visual process (clicking and dragging). Therefore, metaphors had to be developed that made sense to end users. Along with a trash bin (for deleting files), came the standard widgets we see today. (Text boxes, buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, etc.) Integrated development environments (IDE's) offered a method to create an interface using the exact same tools and widgets as the eventual produced final product.

Typically the process of designing an interface is not hard. If you've taken any authoring program courses (Director, Flash, etc.) you will see a lot of the same things and ideas. You laid out what widgets you wanted on your 2-dimensional interface for your program, and then switched to the code generated by the IDE so you can make them come to life.

It is for this reason you can model what the look and feel of the interface is going to look before the code and logic behind it exists. To see what this looks like, I'll point you to a resource for one of Adobe's key technologies, Flex.

Anyone who has taken EDT 504 (Instructional Software design), might have felt overwhelmed with having to learn Flash from the standpoint that it is a timeline-based animation tool that has only within the last few years of its existence been transformed into a learning too. For a brief while, there was a version called Flash Professional which allowed you to break out of the timeline-based animation mode and actually focus on "screens" of information. My impression was that it was never that successful.

Where Flex comes in is that it is more of a programmers tool. However if you want to play with the demo, it isn't too hard to come up with a screen layout of where you want to place buttons, widgets, etc. To me it is a step between PowerPoint as a rapid-dev tool, and Flash.

My take on it is that as instructional designers become more accustomed to seeing programming code within their design work, regardless of their prowess with writing code, they can at least understand how their design can easily interface with code and logic that talks to an LMS or other system to do something intelligent.

For non-programmers who wouldn't even dream of wanting to see programming code behind their Instructional Design product, there are other tools. In our EDT 504 course, (which primarily pushes Flash as the authoring environment of choice for the course) my group used PowerPoint to do a screen-by-screen prototype, and then exported it to Flash format using Keynote (Apple's proprietary slide presentation software). We imported the PowerPoint file into Keynote and then dumped it out to the Flash format. The navigation was weird but we eventually got it to work quite nicely.

I'm wondering, what is everyone else's exposure to rapid prototyping for instructional design work, and what have you seen being used in the field?

Free Flex for Education

Jeffrey — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:57:28 +0000

Adobe released the following news post today: Flex Builder 2.0 will be free to qualifying educators and students.

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/071024/20071023006845.html?.v=1

What this means is that some of the work that I do hopefully will be able to be transferred to a teaching setting. It also shows that Adobe is committed to the educational environment by making this resource available to them at a price point that's agreeable to both. Thanks Adobe!

I wouldn't mind teaching this skill to other people. We'll see what comes of it.

Personal Goals

Jeffrey — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:37:23 +0000

There are some things I would like to accomplish during this time away from my job that aren't necessarily academically related:

Write a new piece of music
Release an application for AIR (which is currently in beta)
Make an inspirational video
Make a lifelong friend (or at least a new one)...
Exercise at least three times per week

I'll keep everyone updated on each of these accomplishments by the time I get finished this semester