Synapsys Blog - May 2005

Multimedia development process models

The process of multimedia development is complex. Each organisation will develop its own process which reflects its own culture, as much as it does good process design principles. Here's an example of one process module developed by Stephen Lowe for use by Level 7 Multimedia Diploma students. Note that each step has rollovers, providing useful background.

Reading in lexiles

What’s a “lexile”?

a. An extinct lizard.
b. A system of measuring reading comprehension levels.
c. A set of exercises designed to strengthen the plexus muscle.

If you’re an educator you will have answered “b” … or would you?

What’s a “lexile”?

a. An extinct lizard.
b. A system of measuring reading comprehension levels.
c. A set of exercises designed to strengthen the plexus muscle.

If you’re an educator you will have answered “b” … or would you?

The system
The system of lexile measurement is a States-based system firmly bound by US education grades and expected levels of comprehension for each grade. If you are able to translate that to your local system then this tool could be useful.

The tool is available on this website.

It consists of a calculator where you:
1. Enter the grade level of your students, e.g.: Grade level 8 is aged 12-13 years approximately.
2. Enter either a percentage expected level of comprehension, or a range of lexile levels.
3. Click the Submit button and the calculator works out either the lexile range required or the percentage rate of comprehension.
4. Scroll down the page and you see a range of reading/comprehension books that fit students in the lexile range.

Writing to the range
If you want to check whether you are writing text at the required level you could use this tool to get a lexile range. You would select the grade that matched the reading age of your students, enter the expected level of comprehension as a percentage (how much you want them to understand the text) and Submit it. The calculator would display the lexile range required of the writing.

The lower the lexile score the simpler the language and the better the comprehension rate.

In order to check your writing against the lexile score you would use the Analyzer. This allows you to browse for your own file, upload it and have it analysed for ease of comprehension. You are fed back a lexile score, which you can compare with the lexile range for the grade of your students.

In my testing, a lexile score of 1210 equated to 74 Flesch Reading Ease and 6.4 Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
The drawbacks
The only files you can upload for analysis are .txt files. Generally you won’t be writing your material in plain text so you will have to copy and paste into another document and you will probably have to do it many times to ensure all of your material is tested for comprehension.

The test takes no account of any accompanying pictures, or special layout, that might assist your students to understand the text.

And, of course, you have to be online to do the testing.

How to select a Learning Management System (LMS)

For many organisations, the process of selecting a Learning Management System is one of the most crucial and difficult tasks in developing eCapability. In our view, many organisations rush to make this decision before being clear about what they really want the system to do, what the best learning experience would be for their staff, and so on. There's a temptation to 'get things going' by buying the technology infrastructure.

The risk is obvious: buy something that doesn't work at your peril. Especially when it may involve a significant capital investment that needs to function for a long time to pay dividends.

How to avoid the risk? Be clear about what you want. Areas to consider include:
-Integration with existing systems
-Ease of installation and support
-Fit between functionality and organisational need

and most importantly...
Be clear about the experience your learners need to succeed, including interface/functionality, activity and resource types, feedback and assessment systems, and linkages to blended learning solutions.

For a background paper than describes an evaluaiton of Open Source LMS solutions, see this link

For support in making your decision, give us a call.

Distributed classification systems: making sense of information

One of the big dilemmas in managing access to knowledge is how to classify it in a way that is meaningful to users. Traditional approaches usually involve developing frameworks of topics or themes that are currently recognised as 'appropriate' for the group. Problems inherent in this approach include:
- A lot of information is not easily classified into a neat box.
- What seemed like a logical framework at the time of creation rapidly loses currency
- People don't necessarily understand such frameworks in the same way, they put different meanings to the same words. This blog entry explores the use of distributed classification systems (DCSs). Essentailly, users classify information in whatever way that makes sense to them using tags. The framework of links between artefacts grows out of the group of users and how they interpret those artefacts......

What are wikis good for?

Along with Blogs, wikis are starting to gain traction as a technology tool that has application to learning. Essentially online documents that can be edited by multiple users, wikis are in a relatively early stage of development, but starting to gain currency with educational institutions. This artilce: http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/augar.html provides useful background on wikis as a tool, and outlines the use of a wiki at Deakin University as an icebreaker activity for online learning.

Browser Wars II

The browser wars of the 1990s may be over but a second, underground, revolution is on its way that may alter the browser market from the inside out. As the importance of web standards and the potential cost of past laxness looms dark on the horizon, a dozing Microsoft may find itself playing catch-up while newcomer Firefox enjoys a welcome boost.

Many of you will remember the 'browser wars' of the mid to late '90s. Back in 1997 Netscape Navigator had more than 70% market share, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer was a minnow with less than 20%. At the time, the differing standards used by the available browsers (affecting CSS support and Javascript implementation, for example) meant making Internet content was a genuine headache. The fact that a given page worked well in one browser was in no way a guarantee that it would work identically in another.

Following the introduction of Internet Explorer 4.0 in 1997, Microsoft's browser began to surge ahead in popularity (not least because it was given away free with Windows 98, although it was also in many ways a far superior product than any of the alternatives) while once top-dog Netscape floundered and eventually fell.

While various anti-trust and regulatory bodies were rightly disturbed by the tactics employed by Microsoft to gain their market dominance, the almost complete market penetration of Internet Explorer made life much easier for the average web developer. If a page worked in Internet Explorer, a satisfactory user experience could be guaranteed for 95% of the page's audience.

While this market dominance was convenient for many, Microsoft's willingness to use its dominance to pressure the competition was the darker flipside of the coin. This came to a head with Microsoft's decision to drop support for Sun Microsystems' Java language. At the time Microsoft's own FrontPage software included Java-based components and Java was, and still is, used by a wide variety of online material. Inevitably this action caused a great deal of indignation in the online community. Many people came to realise that the negative aspects of Microsoft's dominant position greatly outweighed the benefits. At around the same time Microsoft was also becoming increasingly complacent, secure in their position as undisputed king of the browser market, with refinements to their browser becoming ever less frequent, instead focusing on fixes for a seemingly never-ending list of security flaws.

One of the keys to Internet Explorer's success has always been its forgiving nature. Incorrect syntax is usually glossed over, and obvious errors allowed to gracefully degrade without anything more obvious than a small error icon. This benign nature is thanks to the browser's failure to strictly adhere to language protocols such as XHTML, CSS2 and Javascript. This may sound like a good thing, but it isn't.

Pages that are permitted not to follow strict protocols will always have an uncertain future. Will they work in the future with other browsers? What if Microsoft were make their browser's compliance more rigid? Pages would need to be altered in order to function as intended, which would necessitate a large financial outlay for many companies. Not good. More advanced functions, such as those of the CSS2 specification, may also fail to function at all, limiting development possibilities and slowing standards evolution (which naturally go hand-in-hand with the actual use and adoption of these standards). Better to ensure pages meet strict requirements now, ensuring that they will work in the future regardless of browser. However, in order to do this a browser is required that actually follows all the rules.

Enter Mozilla's Firefox. Firefox is a collaborative effort designed to tightly comply with the major web standards, as mandated by the World Wide Web Consortium/W3C (www.w3c.com). Although only in its first full release version (an infant in software terms), Firefox is already recognised as technically superior to Internet Explorer 6.0 (not to mention significantly faster), and is essential equipment for any web developer, whether working primarily for Internet Explorer users or not. Because of Firefox's rendering (and usability; one word: 'tabs') superiority, it has become the browser of choice among developers and is quickly gaining market share. Over 50 million downloads of the Firefox 1.0 browser were recorded in the six months following its introduction in November 2004, backed by a swelling underground support movement.

Since Firefox's introduction, Internet Explorer's market share has dropped to below 87%, while Firefox commands nearly 9% and continues to grow at an impressive rate. At first glance this may not seem very impressive, but these numbers have certainly attracted Microsoft's attention. Microsoft had originally intended to wait until the introduction of their next-generation 'Longhorn' operating system (ETA, 2006-ish) before releasing a newer version of Internet Explorer, but have changed their tune, stating that Internet Explorer 7.0 will be released sometime in the fourth quarter of 2005. It is rumoured to have enhanced functionality, including tabbing, and greater (although not complete) adherence to the major web standards. Unsurprisingly, it will also tightly integrate with Microsoft's upcoming spyware software and many of the security enhancement introduced with XP SP2. We may well be on the verge of 'browser wars II'.

Regardless of the outcome of this pending face-off, the growing acceptance of web standards among the online community makes development of rigid pages not only desirable but essential. Failure to do so will cost you and your company money when you find yourself forced to recreate pages that have already been made once before. The relaxed approach to standards is fast becoming as obsolete as the horse and buggy.

Ectus Media e-learning tool

Introduction
New Zealand-owned Asnet Technologies Limited is the authorised distributor of the entire Polycom® Office, including the full range of voice, video and web-based conferencing products and management tools. Two of these products are Ectus Media and Ectus Place.

Ectus Media allows streaming of live video conferences to PCs with users able to interact in real-time via an integrated chat facility.

Introduction
New Zealand-owned Asnet Technologies Limited is the authorised distributor of the entire Polycom® Office, including the full range of voice, video and web-based conferencing products and management tools. Two of these products are Ectus Media and Ectus Place.

Ectus Media allows streaming of live video conferences to PCs with users able to interact in real-time via an integrated chat facility. It also records the conference, indexes and makes the content available. Ectus Place links the content with a collaborative environment for e-learning. Ectus Media can also be used to deliver pre-recorded digital video or presentations.

Government Sponsorship
The company received a $300,000 grant from Technology New Zealand for research and development and a $20,000 Business Development grant from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise for branding strategy.

The advertising material shows a single leader talking to several listeners in a single room, and this is the limitation of Ectus Media 200 – it can only have two concurrent connections, and a limitation of 10,000 page views per day. At the top end Ectus Media 800 allows eight H.323 connections with up to 50,000 page views per day.

Off-line Access
Participants do not need to remain connected to the network to access collaborative material – including online conversations. With News Reader access and email integration, participants and hosts can minimise their connect time.

Ectus Place expands the useability of Ectus Media by adding chat, integrated email, and search of recorded conferencing. The advertising blurb suggests uses such as:

1. Brainstorm: Collaboratively develop, discuss and rate ideas
2. Workbooks: Create personal journals, ePortfolios, drop-boxes etc.
3. Wiki: Collaborative web page development
4. Peer Review: Quick and easy set up of peer review and assessment tasks
5. Personal Calendar: Comprehensive web-based calendar
6. Shared Calendars: Simple or comprehensive group calendars
7. Weblogs: Standards based blogging
8. File Management: Make file stores available through the web
9. Message Attachments: Attach multiple files to messages
10. Inline Images: Image .les displayed in messages “inline ”
11. User Photos: User controlled photos and personal pro .les
12. Instant Messaging: Self-contained web based Instant Messenger service
13. Who ’s Online: Quickly see who else is logged in.

TeleTeaching
TeleTeaching Via Videoconference is steadily climbing, as teachers from schools and tertiary institutions undertake asnet's 3 day Certificate in TeleTeaching course - 'Mai te Hui-Ataata' - Via Videoconference. Begun 18 months ago, the intensive 3-day workshops have seen over 140 graduates from 15 courses. The Certificate in TeleTeaching courses sprang from a need to transfer good teaching practice into the videoconference environment, with particular requirements to suit the wharekura's need to teach and learn in Te Reo Maori.
Graduate TeleTeachers thus far are from Wharekura, Paerangi, East Coast schools, from ICTPD school providers, and Otago rural secondary schools.

Denise Hansen from asnet is facilitator, with Mercia Dawn Yates as Maori co-facilitator where this is required. Teachers work 'on-line' between two videoconferenced classrooms, adapting their sample resources and teaching style to suit the medium. Best teaching practice reigns for the 3 days.

Feedback from workshop evaluation forms has given clear indication that teachers are highly motivated by the new skills gained. And as a bonus, teaching in front of colleagues, hearing their feedback, and evaluating others as they teach, is of enormous value, and is often a first in their teaching careers.

Find out more from the Ectus website.