Finally dipped my toe into the 2009 Edition of George and Stephen’s Massive Online Course (MOOC). Several familiar names in the Moodle forum.

Not much to post at this time, just was making sure that my blog was still operational; had been a few months since I was here. I have been concentrating on my professional site in recent weeks (Still accepting graphic design donations).

I did want to call attention one of the tenets of Connectivism with which I heartily disagree:

Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known. Knowing where to find information is more important than knowing information.

My response to that somewhere between ‘no!’ and “I’m going to need some convincing!”

You’ll find that point in a zillion places on the Internet, but this will save you some clicks.

Looking forward to debating this and other points in the class.

As a result of just peering into the course tonight, I joined yet another Ning network. Another 130 people in the world now know how old I am.

Is my converter working?

A visual expression of my resume (a Wordie)

Scott Resume as a wordie

There were national security speeches by President Obama and former Vice President Cheney. I ran both speeches through Wordie.

Guesses to whom the speeches belong to?

Great explanation of DAM on Masters of Digital Assets forum on Linkedin. Explains importance of metadata, cautions against bit rot; all in the form of a 60’s action cartoon.

Many thanks to Chris Orr of University of California for posting.

I am currently re-acquainting myself with some learning management systems and thus have been discussing  the SCORM interoperability standard with several of my cyberfriends. I sat down today with intent to  blog about SCORM.
However, as was the case with my SharePoint-as-DAM blog a few weeks back, I already had provided a pretty good description of SCORM on a Linkedin discussion (for Masters of Digital Assets) in response to a question that was  posted by Michael Moon.

So in the spirit of content reuse, here is my response to  Michael’s SCORM  question:

My previous company had a fairly large presence in the educational market, thus I was involved in several projects in which we utilized SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK) to deliver SCORM-compliant learning object. SLK is an open-source add-on to SharePoint. SLK will store and deliver SCORM-compliant learning content, and permits  the storage of assessment data. 

However, if a learning object is properly described it will (read: ’should’) work with any learning management system that is SCORM-compliant. Most learning management systems (Blackboard, Moodle..) will provide SCORM support. 

I recently  found this site. I don’t know anything about the software that the company is peddling, but the site does offer a pretty good  SCORM overview. 

There’s a number of authoring tools that enable the creation of SCORM content. Additionally there are some third-party tools that will allow a user to make SCORM packages from file formats such as PowerPoint, or Word. 

I recently worked on a project where I developed the SCORM-compliant content. The tool of choice was Adobe Captivate (GREAT tool for demonstrations and assessment). The learning objects were Flash-based .zip packages and were delivered with SLK. Users had the ability to view demonstrations (SharePoint ‘how-to’s”) at any time, and could prove competency by taking quizzes. 

For those of you researching SCORM, you’ll find zillions of presentations and papers that try to describe SCORM with a Lego metaphor—implying that learning objects are easily snapped together to form lessons, or entire courses. HA! 

I once ran across a presentation which suggested that aggregating SCORM learning objects more resembled this game. I thought BOM was a little closer to the mark

The message here, is that a SCORM-compliant learning management system is going require planning, development, training and maintenance. Be wary of any reference to Legos when talking about learning objects.

I am currently developing some (DAM-related)  ideas in the accessibility space and will writing more about SCORM-savvy DAM tools in future posts.

For now, back to my Moodle proof of concept.

A few days ago, my oldest brother died of a degenerative brain condition. He was a father of four, grandfather of nine; successful business man and Vietnam War vet. The root cause of condition is not known, though some of his doctors had speculated that his repeated exposure to agent orange may have been a factor.

I honestly don’t know that much about him. Our 15-year age gap and geographic disparity were certainly reasons. Though family dynamics were a bigger factor. Let it suffice to say that my family’s history is ‘colorful’ even for those of the Irish-Catholic, Boston-area variety. A detailed description of the extended Smith-Davenport clans is certainly beyond the scope of this note.

Those of you that know me really well are aware of my spiritual skepticism. I may be wired a little differently than some. I questioned the existence of God when my believe in Santa Clause was resolute (you can thank Kukla, Fran and Ollie). Survival of a critical illness when I was in my late teens, brought me to the agnostic plateau.

These are beliefs that I have not hidden; nor have I flaunted them.

I know that some of you who have known me for a while, will be inclined to pray for me, my family. I am not so inclined. However, regardless of your faith, or lack thereof, I am asking one thing of all of you: support the troops.

I don’t know for sure that agent orange was the culprit in my brother’s death. However, his condition and the recent death of my father–25 years as Naval corpsman–have caused me to ponder what the phrase “Support the Troops” really means to me. I have already written much on the topic and hope to share my thoughts in the future.

You all have your own views about what supporting the troops means; however I think that if you haven’t already done so; you can start by acknowledging the service of your friends and family,

Many of you have heard me become pretty vocal in my criticism of past presidents (Bush II, Clinton… all the way back to Kennedy; pretty non-partisian in my vitriol). Some rationales for military action I have agreed with, some I haven’t. Some executions have been handled well; others have been a disaster.

In looking at my FB friends list, I can see several folks (Gene, Julio, Jay, Ashley, Jason…apologies if I’ve missed anybody) who have suited up. They didn’t put us into any of these overseas predicaments. If you know any of them, drop them a note expressing your feelings. Do the same with your spouse, parents, kids, friends…..anybody that you know who has worn a uniform.

It doesn’t matter if you’re jingoist or pacifist, or whether you agree with a specific military campaign or not. My father, enlisted in the Navy in 1942, the day after he graduated from high school. He believed in what we were doing in WWII; was a little bit less sure about Korea. My brother was drafted. They both went to Vietnam; they felt it was their duty.

For reasons that I have mentioned, I won’t be participating in Easter-related activities, except those of the secular variety….mmmm, chocolate However, this is a time of continued reflection about the lives of both of the men named Robert Smith, that I’ve recently lost. And how I can support the troops.

One of my professional contacts recently sent me an article about digital asset management (DAM) trends. In addition to providing  a layer of validation about my predictions for DAM opportunities in 2009, the article gave me a reason to review a blog I published a few weeks ago about SharePoint-as-DAM.

I think that the message of my original post might have been obfuscated in the discussion of SharePoint and DAM products. If so, here is my point: interoperability. There will be fewer full-scale implementations of content systems in 2009 than in 2008 (or 2007…). The opportunities to enable peaceful co-existence of legacy systems are still there.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from this map. And I feel a need to extend CMS Watch’s metaphor.  How do you establish a bus route between your  portal (SharePoint, Interwoven, …) and your DAM (Telescope, Artesia..). How can you build a bike path  between your Web site (Vignette, IBM…) and your WordPress blog?  (Many thanks to Tony Byrne et al for creating and maintaining this great visual representation).

I will write more on the larger topic of interoperability in the near future, In the meantime here is a refreshed edition of SharePoint-as-DAM blog:

I have been having conversations about SharePoint and  digital asset management  with software developers and prospective clients for several weeks.  I had been meaning to pencil down some of my thoughts, but had not gotten around to it. Fortunately, Michael Moon had posed a SharePoint-as-DAM question on Linkedin’s Masters of Digital Assets discussion forum.  My response is below:

SharePoint certainly has its merits. It’s actually relatively painless to set up a web site or an intranet with SharePoint. Its document and picture libraries allow for storage, versioning, metadata-customization and simple workflow for file management. Furthermore, SharePoint provides the means to add wikis, blogs and social networking to an organization’s portal. So, in the sense that any content that adds to organizational value is an asset…SharePoint does offer DAM capabilities.

However, my background is in publishing and advertising, so I’m something a DAM snob. I don’t think that SharePoint provides adequate functionality to be used as a DAM solution. A few strong opinions ahead:

SharePoint is Microsoft-centric (Surprise!). You can save file metadata directly from a document….as long as it’s an Office document. This a great thing considering that most organizations use Office documents. However—I’m going to go out an limb here– some organizations evaluating DAM solution might be working with Adobe products, or other tools such as Quark Xpress.

SharePoint has flimsy file-conversion options. SharePoint can be configured to convert things like Word and Excel to HTML; but there is no built-in functionality to convert images (.psd to jpeg……ai to png, etc.). Anybody who is talking about DAM is talking about images! On-the-fly conversions of image are a must in a DAM solution.

SharePoint offers no sophisticated integration with compound-content tools.  Remember the term “desktop publishing” from the last millennium? Well, organizations still print.  Layout tools such as Quark and InDesign are still prevalent. Mature DAM tools (such as Telescope, Artesia, MediaBecaon..) offer sophisticated drag-and-drop capabilities for adding images to layout documents. SharePoint does not.

Color Management is not on SharePoint’s radar. Did I mention that organizations still print? The demise of the CMYK world has been greatly exaggerated. And while the volume of print production may drop the importance of color-fidelity is constant. Brand-conscious organizations are inflexible when it comes to color, and they should be. SharePoint idoes not support color-profiling as do industry-leading DAM tools.

I could go on. I have not even addressed SharePoint’s support for video files.

To be clear, the inadequacies that I have described are in reference to an out-of-the-box SharePoint implementations. It’s possible to add some DAM-specific functionality to SharePoint with customization. However, I think the answer is more likely in third-party add-ons to SharePoint, or perhaps integrating SharePoint with a traditional DAM solution.

There are some third-party tools that can help SharePoint towards DAM. When I first started working with SharePoint a while back, I demo’d some SharePoint add-ons (Web Parts) from Scene7 (now an Adobe product) and Equilibirum  among others. These Web Parts allow SharePoint to have a more-traditional DAM flavor by offering functionality to convert images, or add items to a shopping cart.

In the past few months, I have had several conversations about the prospect of integrating SharePoint with DAM solutions (happy to talk your ear off about such things you want to reply privately . I know of a former client that implemented a robust DAM solution many years ago and is in the midst of integrating that with SharePoint, which they are using for web content management. I think such integrations with SharePoint will be hot  area for the DAM industry.

One of the problems I’ve seen with SharePoint user acceptance is the ‘like factor”. People hear about SharePoint’s social networking, enterprise search and other features and are expecting it to be be ‘like Facebook’, “like Google” etc. Users have inflated expectations of certain features and may be somewhat disappointed when SharePoint  is implemented.

I think when DAM is mentioned with respect to SharePoint, assumptions seemed to be that SharePoint is “like Artesia” “like Telescope” or “like Mediabeacon.” An out-of-the-box SharePoint implementation will fall short on this front, too.

SharePoint ain’t like DAM.

To reiterate: SharePoint has many strengths, but in my admittedly-snobbish opinion, DAM isn’t among them. Still, I think there are numerous opportunities for SharePoint to work in conjunction with established DAM technology. As the previously-cited CMSWire article contends, DAM vendors will ignore SharePoint at their own peril.

At my wife’s behest, I finally created a Facebook account and was able to catch up with a few friends that I have not seen for a many months or decades.

Yesterday I did a search of alumni of the high school I almost went to. We left Westford, MA for Florida back in the 70’s when I was not quite 14. I managed to find a few friends from bygone days. One of whom sent me the following message:

Hey, Scott. Yes. I remember you well. One time, we were in the playground / parking lot at Sergeant School and we were near that big tree right in the middle of everything and for some idiotic reason I felt we needed to fight each other. I remember you were a big kid, and you probably could have killed me, but you were kind and refused to fight me.

You probably don’t remember that exact incident, but I’d like to apologize for being an asshole.

Why did everyone in Westford want to fight everyone else?

I don’t have the answer to his question, but it was great that he was able purge himself of the guilt he has carried around for all these decades.

It was nice to learn that there was a time in my school life that I would exercise such restraint. Ironically, one of my first Facebook connections–a high school friend– remembers how he and I were jumped by a bunch of guys (essentially, it was an entire subdivision) because of my inability to hold my tongue, or my fists, after being whacked in the head by a thrown chunk of ice. To this friend, I’d like to apologize for being an asshole.

About a year ago my son (who is now five) started having behavioral problems both at home and at school. He was at an age were kids test their limits, but he also decided that it was really uncool to sleep. We started to see monstrous tantrums that were characterized by hitting anything within his reach and throwing any object that he could lift. There was point when I took him out for a walk and within 10 yards from our home he got mad at something and started smacking and kicking our dog. At school, he started to do his talking with his fists: teachers as well as playmates fell victim to his fury.

It took us a few weeks, but we were able to get him turned around at home. It certainly helped when he started sleeping again.

He continued to have flare ups at school: throwing toys and hitting/kick classmates and teachers. There were some prolonged good periods, but we changed his schedule when I lost my job and his disruptive and aggressive behaviors seemed be more prevalent.

I am currently between jobs and I have a tiny bit of knowledge about behavioral modification. I had pondered some possible interventions. But I was loathe to implement any programs in the school, because I didn’t want my son’s behavior to be contingent on my (or my wife’s) presence or absence from the classroom.
His school’s model is to have the children work out their problems. If the conflict or outburst is particularly intense the child taken away by a teacher to another part of the room, or another room to “calm their body.” There are several children, including my son who are not prone to respond to this method. In my son’s case, he is not only unresponsive, often method seems to make him angrier. When he gets worked up, he seems to carry a grudge and tends to be prone to more bad behavior during the day.

Fortunately, my son’s godfather is a child behavior expert. He was been offering his talents in applied behavior analysis to children with developmental disabilities and autism for decades. He has recently begun work with abused kids and to implement behavioral modification programs in school systems comprised of children of low-ecomic privilege.
He said that it would not be a problem for me to implement the program for my own child then transition it to his teachers.

My friend had seen some videos of my son and said that correcting the behaviors would be “a cinch.” His answer was pretty much this “Extinction. Extinction. Extinction.”

OK…so we’re essentially talking about timeouts. Makes sense; we do those at home. That’s why we regained control of him after last year’s brief period of constant outbursts (it didn’t seem like a brief period when we were in the midst of it).

Timeout needed to be four minutes in duration. There should never be a condition involved such as ‘when you can stop yelling.” Child need to be removed from the context in which the negative behavior was occurring. Nobody (teachers, students, parents…) is to talk to the child during the timeout.

Here is the magic. If, and only if, a timeout is called and the child relocates to the timeout area within 10 seconds the timeout is 1 minute in duration. If he/she resists going the timeout is 4 minutes. No room for negotiation.
On Monday my son and I discussed that he would there would now be timeouts at school as there were at home I spoke to his teachers and we agreed that there would be two designated timeout areas.

Later Monday afternoon, I asked him which he liked better “short timeouts” or “long timeouts” His answer was a resounding “Short timeouts!” I explained to him what would constitute a short timeout and the conditions that would necessitate a long timeout.

On Monday evening. He was getting a surly with his mom when it was time to clean up his cars. I said “Timeout” and he vaulted up the stairs–from the basement to the 3rd floor—like an Olympic medalist. Just after one conversation.

Early in theweek while the teachers were reviewing their room real estate for timeout zones, the temporary area was the adult bathroom. I would be responsible for calling timeouts and for implementing them. Boy did I pay for that.

My friend had warned me about extinction bursts—where the negative behavior would temporarily increase both in both frequency and intensity. That is, behavior would temporarily get MUCH MUCH worse before it got better. Fortunately, I had been through this at home thus was prepared for an assault when timeout would become the norm at school.

On Tuesday was his first timeout and it was something like a CIA rendition. He didn’t budge, so I whisked him away to the bathroom and spent next four minutes with my son screaming at a pitch to curdle the blood. While flailing around he bumped his head on the door at one point and yowled “You’re popping my bones!!” I endured a flurry left jabs, uppercuts and roundhouse kicks to my thighs. All the time, I was silent and gently lifted back into the room’s corner each time he strayed.

He was tuckered out after four minutes of howling and pugilism. We stepped out and he put is teeth on my shoulder. He wasn’t actually biting me and had a smirk on his face, but still that act could not be tolerated. I didn’t get to ask my friend about back-to-back timeouts, but my parental decision was “Timeout” he resisted so I endured a less-ferocious four minutes in the bathroom.

On Wednesday, he got into a shoving match with one of his classmates. I called “Timeout” and he bolted to the bathroom. No screaming and no fisticuffs this time. In one minute he was back at play time, bearing no grudges.
Thursday and Friday were exceptionally good days for him so no timeouts were necessary.

There were a couple of timeout-worthy infractions at home over the weekend and in both cases, he went immediately to the designated timeout area.

Monday (today), we “went live” with “in-room” timeout areas. Timeout was called on my son three times; twice by me and once by the lead teacher when I was out of the room. In each case, he went immediately to a timeout area, thus they were all 1 minute in duration.

Boo-yah! Obstacle one seems to have been cleared. I was a little queasy-stomached about my son’s willingness to adhere to an in-room timeouts. However, he conformed in every case. We were especially pleased that he was so punctual when the timeout was ordered by the teacher.

I am going to be working to completely transition myself away from the classroom over the next few days. I expect that he’ll resist compliance if he ordered to a timeout by one of the assistant teacher as they seem to have less leverage over him than the lead teacher.

We are way too early in this project to label it a success, but all looks promising. I am keeping records of the frequency of targeted behavior to see how this program of behavioral extinction works to reduce problem behavior. I’ll keep you posted.