The eLearning Guild Rocks!!!

It has been my pleasure to be associated with The eLearning Guild (www.elearningguild.com) since near its start in 2002. I have taught preconference classes and sessions at most of the Guild conferences and at each conference I have also enjoyed myself immensely and have learned tremendous amounts from others.

The folks running the Guild are topnotch professionals and awfully nice to boot.

David Holcombe and Heidi Fisk have run the Guild from the start, helping it grow from a few hundred members to several tens of thousands! David is the executive leader of the Guild while Heidi wears several hats, including the all-important organizer of all the Guild events.

Steve Wexler is the Guild's Director of Research and Emerging Technologies. The Research site is the best around; in fact, it's downright fantastic. Besides several valuable reports that have been published, the site has live, up-to-the minute reports based on surveys being filled out around the clock on various subjects by Guild members. Remember there are tens of thousands of them and they represent a cross-section of e-learning professionals and learners. It's very interactive, allowing you to drill down and find the exact answers you need. WELL WORTH IT!

Bill Brandon is the nicest editor with whom I have ever worked and that is saying something considering how much work it is for him to put together each issue of the Guild's Learning Solutions e-Magazine! As of this writing, there are 230 issues of of this great publication and each issue is chock full of practical advice, strategies, discussions and more. We're talking good stuff here, folks. I've had the pleasure to have had a few articles published in the Magazine, though I'm sorry to say it's been a while since I've written an article for Bill. He's a very patient man. Soon, Bill, as soon as I can!

Karen Hyder runs all of the on-line forums and conferences. Officially she's the Online Events Moderator and Speaker coach. I can't think of anything to say about Karen that doesn't sound as if she's paying me. I hold her in high esteem, very friendly and a real pro, she makes both teaching and learning online very easy. She also is at all the conferences and is always running around helping out. What a great asset she is to the Guild.

Tim Martin arranges for the conference expositions and advertising. He also is a great guy with whom to work, friendly, knowledgeable and always ready to help. Luis Malbas is the tech guy, and he knows what he's doing. The site is powerful and runs really well!

The Guild has an Advisory Board that has some of the biggest names in eLearning on it (no, I'm not on it yet haha). They help guide the Guild in various ways - I guess you can call them Guild Guides!

I know I'm leaving out some folks but these guys and gals are the heart and brains of the Guild. They have made the Guild what it is - a fantastic resource for all e-learning professionals and those who are interested in e-learning.

DazzleTech has helped the Guild whenever possible and we're happy that in our own small ways we have been privileged to be associated with this great organization!

There are several levels of membership, including a free level - why not take advantage of the Guild's offerings? I am very proud of my eLearning Guild membership! Join and you will be too!

Very Active Group...Denver Metro E-Learning Developers Group

Even if you're not in the Denver area, you may want to consider joining this Yahoo group. It is very active:

Denver Metro E-Learning Developers Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dmeld
Meets about four times a year
Next meeting date: see link
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 pm
Location: FX One Seven Zero, Technical Marketing Group, 424 East Simpson Street, Lafayette
Contact: Phil Tobias philtobias@aol.com

New m-Learning Forum

My friend Susan McDonald-Osborne just started a new m-Learning forum on Facebook.

If you have a Facebook account or are ready to start one, click here.

The End of an Era...Authorware is Discontinued

"Authorware is Dead"...I have heard these words ever since I started using the product, back when it was sold by Authorware, Inc., in May 1990. I fell in love with this product, its flow line approach, its inclusion of a scripting language...albeit a very limited one in that first version on the Mac. With time, the scripting language got more powerful and JavaScript was added as an alternative, and a few icons were added, including the Framework and Navigate icons.

Eventually Macromedia asked me to help with the product and as you can see above, my name appeared in the credits.

Articles and Books
The product for me was simple but challenging and I liked it enough to start writing books about it, books that sold relatively well in such a small niche market. I wrote articles about it for Brandon Hall and for the eLearning Guild, among others. Writing my first book instantly made me recognized by many who previously didn't know me.

Conferences
I am the only person alive who has attended every single Authorware conference. Not only that, but I have also spoke and taught at every one of them. Let's start with The Alternative Authorware Conference (TAAC), started by my good friend Tom Adams. Did TAAC really mean Tom Adams Authorware Conference? It was continued later by Mark Henry. A couple of times Mark held TAAC in the Adams Mark hotel - really? Adams Mark? Tom Adams Mark Henry? Strange. I keynoted at several TAACs and was presented with a lifetime achievement award, seen here. The very first year of TAAC I was asked to be keynote speaker by Tom. I arrived in Snowbird, Utah, with bronchitis. The thinner air didn't help. I gave my keynote and then was brought to Urgent Care where they gave me antibiotics and promised me I wouldn't die (ever). Ah, memories of imminent death!

Then there was EuroTAAC, which was held in The Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Germany over the years. This year my friend Ole Kristensen held it in Randers, Denmark. I keynoted at several of these and taught precon at most of these as well. This year I even appeared on the Danish TV news. You can see the clip here. It's in Danish, but you can make out the words "guru Joe Ganci", "e-learning" and something about "what a sexy guy."

Tom Adams later created another conference called TAW - the Texas Authorware Workshop. Once again, though, we wondered if it didn't stand for the Tom Adams Workshop! Kidding, kidding. This was held in Dallas two years in a row. Very enjoyable, very informative.

Finally, there was AMGAC (Aviation, Military and Government Authorware Conference) founded by AMy Blankenship. It was small but wonderful, held in Biloxi, Mississippi. Amy and I became better friends. I was already friends with Steve Howard, who is originally from Scotland, lived in England, and helped take over EuroTAAC after the Dutchies sold it off. Steve and Amy eventually married in Biloxi. I went to their wedding. Never had I heard a stranger mix of accents - Scottish and Mississipian! They are good friends to me and always will be. They were in the path of Hurricane Katrina later, but survived and are doing well today.

You can see lots of conference photos here on our Authorware site.

Training
Over the years, I trained Authorware all over the United States, Canada and Europe. I love teaching and it gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of great people, many of whom I count among my friends.

Loyalty
Authorware developers tend to be fierce defenders of the product. The battles between religious sects are nothing when compared with the battles between Authorware adherents and those who liked opposing tools!

Recent History
When I started my own company, the esteemed DazzleTech, I was well-known as an Authorware guru, so naturally most of the work we got were from clients using Authorware. It wasn't long, though, before we realized we had to diversify to be able to reach the largest number of clients. I was an old-time programmer and became conversant with Flash. I had already used Director and other tools and then started looking for contractors and employees to hire that knew more than I did. I hit pay dirt when I brought on Chris Swenson and eventually made him a partner in the company. He not only sponges up new technologies easily, he is innovative and comes up with great solutions all the time. He is the author behind our own authoring system, Substance.

The Death of Authorware
Authorware's demise has been predicted from the start. Every few months, rumors of Authorware's death were circulated, usually by those who used other authoring tools. Sometimes the rumors came from Adobe employees, but it was hard to know what to believe because the rumors were so frequent and then another version of Authorware would be released. I always said that like any software, Authorware would eventually reach the end of its life cycle. I'm happy to say it has lasted twenty years in the marketplace! That's quite an achievement and a tribute to Michael Allen, who created the product, and to Jamil Zainasheff, among many others, who continued to engineer and defend the product at Macromedia.

But now we've reached the end, for all practical purposes. Yes, for the time being version 7.02 will continue to be sold, but it's time to move on. Good luck to us all.

Read Adobe's announcement here.

Adobe Captivate 3

I had the pleasure of being one of the first, perhaps the very first, to present Captivate 3 in a live conference setting. My company and I personally have been using this product since it was called RoboDemo because it's a great product for doing a lot of what we do for our clients. It's unmatched at creating software simulations but also can be used for creating lots of other kinds of e-learning, including soft skills training. I often tout it as a product that balances ease of use with power - a constant struggle for any e-learning tool developer.

Jaws dropped when I showed both Captivate 2 and Captivate 3, which was just released. They loved the trimode recording, how they now can retain animations from PowerPoint imports, the fact that quizzes can now be randomized and the new transitions.

Most of the people had never used Captivate before so every feature was new to them. They were really happily surprised by the product. One person moaned about how they had wasted their money on Firefly (a much more expensive competing product) and found it so hard to use that they had given up on it. Now that they had seen how easy Captivate was they were going to have their organization get it right away! You can see more about Captivate here. I'll write more about Captivate soon.

I'm proud of the fact that some very good friends of mine were involved in the creation of Captivate 3. Among them are:

Group Business Development Manager
--Marc Hosein

Product Marketing Managers
--Silke Fleischer
--Karl Matthews

Core Director
--Tridb Roy Chowdhury

Engineering
--Stefan van As

Don't be upset if your name isn't on the list above. That either means that I forgot you were involved or you need to be a better friend to me (haha).

Here's a partial list of new features in Captivate 3. This is directly out of the Help section, so I'm quoting here.

Multimode recording
Save time and generate robust software simulations with multiple learning modes in a single recording session, including a demonstration of the procedure, a simulation for practicing the steps, and an assessment.

Randomized quizzing and question pools
Improve learner assessments by randomly drawing questions from a set of question pools. Shuffle the answer options for multiple-choice questions, so that the answers are displayed in a different order each time. Share question pools among multiple Adobe Captivate projects.

Rollover slidelets
Provide additional just-in-time information on Adobe Captivate 3 slides by displaying media-rich content including images, text, audio, and video in a slidelet (a mini-slide within a slide) when the learner moves the mouse over a specified area on the slide.

XML export and import
Simplify the localization process of projects; export captions to a text or XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) file. Import the translated text file into a copy of the original project file.

Automated rerecording
Quickly update content and automatically rerecord entire procedures in most web applications after the user interface is modified or localized (Internet Explorer® 6).

Animation effects
Create learning content with support for animated slide transitions (besides fade in / fade out) and PowerPoint® animations. Import PowerPoint (PPT) files and retain many animation effects by converting PowerPoint slides to SWF files.

New question types
Increase learning effectiveness with specialized question types, such as sequencing and hotspots, and matching dropdown lists.

Streamlined workflow and usability enhancements

1. Work faster with a wide variety of streamlined workflows and usability enhancements:
2. Improved learning management system (LMS) integration
3. Reusing quiz slides
4. Reducing SWF file size
5. Branching view enhancements, such as slide grouping and zooming
6. New choices for adding captions and buttons
7. Microsoft® Windows Vista™ and Microsoft Office 2007 support
8. Install Adobe Captivate 3 on Windows Vista and import PowerPoint (PPT) files from Office 2007, or create handouts or step-by-step procedures with the Microsoft Word export option.

Re-recording software simulations
When changes are introduced into a software application, or when you need to create separate projects in multiple languages, you can use the re-recording feature in Adobe Captivate.

To do this, you must select the option to generate re-recording information when you create a new Adobe Captivate project. As a result, a script file (.cprr) is created
When changes are introduced into a software application, or when you need to create separate projects in multiple languages, you can use the re-recording feature in Adobe Captivate.
To do this, you must select the option to generate re-recording information when you create a new Adobe Captivate project. As a result, a script file (.cprr) is created. You can use the Generate Re-recording Information option when you first generate a project to create a re-recording script file. The re-recording script is saved as an XML file with the .cprr extension.

Learn more about Adobe Captivate here.

TBCON

I just finished teaching four sessions over 3 days at TBCON in beautiful Colorado Springs. With me in the photo are Jeff and Sue Rhodes, the organizers who hold the conference every year. It's an excellent value! I taught at TBCON last year and came back for a return engagement. I taught the following sessions:

1. Captivate 3.0 Features You Really Need to Know (Tips and Tricks)
2. XML-Driven Flash Engines and Why They Matter
3. eLearning Games - Updated!
4. When Things Go Horribly Wrong - How to Save Your e-Learning Project

I love teaching sessions and I think it shows. I always get very positive evaluations (except for once in a while a grumpy person doesn't get my sense of humor!).

Soon I'll be teaching at SALT in Washington, D.C., and at Adobe Max in Chicago.

Welcome to My Blog

Hi, all, and welcome to my professional blog. If you'd like to see my personal blog, you can click here. In this blog, I'll be discussing my musings and observations about the e-learning industry. I've been in this field since 1983 when through a series of circumstances I got to work on a now-ancient CBT system called TICCIT (Time Shared Interactive Computer-Controlled Information Television). It had a dedicated keyboard that would allow students to hit keys to see Rules, Examples, and Practice Problems. I created an Italian language course (I speak Italian, among other languages) over a 3-year period. I fell in love with the idea of using computers to teach and with the idea of my programming them to do it! I love teaching classes, I love writing, I love programming and here I could do it all at once in this medium. That was the beginning of my career!

So here is my bio:
Joe Ganci has been involved since 1983 in every aspect of multimedia and learning development with an emphasis in development. Mr. Ganci has taught classes and seminars at leading universities, in many government facilities, commercial firms, and educational institutions, and has spoken at industry conferences in North American and Europe. He is also a published author, having written several books and articles about e-Learning, and is widely considered a guru for his expertise in e-Learning development. He has consulted on a wide range of multimedia and learning applications worldwide for many organizations. Mr. Ganci holds a degree in Computer Science.