EduTechnorama » Flex

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.

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.

Engaging Learners Appropriately

Jeffrey — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:03:09 +0000

One of the things I’ve been really interested in is finding a way to increase interactivity in online educational experiences I’ve been developing. Many people with the same interest as far as the web is concerned call this concept engagement. It addresses issues such as “How do I make an online experience more interactive such that it induces genuine interest and a desire to continue in that experience, while at the same time increase or serve some other ulterior goal?” For business people, it means encouraging users return to an online store to purchase more goods. For entertainment people, it means enticing consumers to watch an online episode of production (video or animation). For educators, this means that we want to engage our students so that they will on their own desire to continue in a learning activity while accomplishing the goal of learning.

In all these cases, the content producer provides the experience, and the content consumer walks away with a desire to return. Specific to education, we are to engage our students in a good learning experience and we want them to desire to learn based on that experience. The overall outcome is a student who leaves our instruction feeling like they got their return on investment (time, money, effort, etc.) and we as instructors know we have helped someone to learn and to grow.

As far as technology is concerned, we should be looking for ways to appropriately select/design/implement technology that increases this rather than overwhelms someone with new technology that is difficult to learn and/or cumbersome to set up.

For the web, a big buzzword being pushed by content developers/designers is what is being called RIA’s or Rich Internet Applications. What this means is that we can use technology to enhance a web site to the point where it becomes more usable than just a static page of text. It becomes alive and responsive, with minimal impact on the hardware/software requirements and prior user knowledge/experience. For a while now we’ve been seeing this with Web 2.0 (a term I still don’t like using, but will anyway for the sake of communicating with others who do understand and use it), and social networking concepts.

I’ve been experimenting with Adobe’s Flex platform which allows a software developer to create a single-frame Flash application using traditional programming methods rather than the Flash authoring tool which has an animator/designer perspective. The types of things that can be created with this are endless and Adobe is very quick to push this into the mainstream. Adobe sees it as the best thing since sliced bread was invented, and for the time being I agree with them. If enough developers get behind it, I can see it influencing desktop educational software development for quite some time.

One of the recent products developed on the Adobe Flex RIA mindset is a tool called Scrapblog. It’s a tool that allows anyone to create a rich engaging multimedia presentation that is shareable across computing platforms for free.

I’m going to try and create something cool and post it here later this week so stay tuned. Check out some things that others have done: (I haven’t seen many educational focused presentations yet, but intend to change that soon!)

http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer.aspx?sbid=31324

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>

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?

Buzzword

Jeffrey — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:55:51 +0000

No it's not google docs, but with this upcoming tool, soon it will be of no consequence to require MS word format from any student because the format will be free regardless.

Here's another alternative: Buzzword

Here's a presentation about it and demo.

http://adobedev.adobe.acrobat.com/p91904463/

What I like about buzzword over Google Docs is the ability to insert images. It's possible in Google Docs, but very difficult. This is so much easier.

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.

Testing Some Code

Jeffrey — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:25:05 +0000

I'll be posting some code examples here eventually. One of the things I would like to focus this blog into becoming is a resource where people from academic communities and other web developer communities can come to learn from my successes and mistakes at the same time. I'm always looking for ways to improve and show people the ways I got what I needed to get done in hopes they can repeat the process and not have to be frustrated like I have been.

So here's a short snippet of code for MXML using the WordPress plugin iG:Syntax Hiliter:

PLAIN TEXT

XML:

:Application
xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
layout="absolute">
anel x="140" y="100"
width="250" height="200"
layout="absolute"
title="Educational Example">
anel>
:Application>

Note: The plugin doesn't support MXML syntax directly (for Flex and AIR apps), but MXML's closest ancestor according to the plugin docs is XML. Maybe someday I'll see about trying to get it to work and look more integrated into the blog page design (which I also hope to enhance/change sometime)