Mylearning.be

I was looking at the stats of my blog, and some of the most visited articles are the ones about Microsoft LCDS. A lot of people are contacting me because they have trouble publishing the LCDS content to a learning management system (e.g. to the SharePoint Learning Kit). Tom Molskov already posted a very useful comment with a procedure on how to do this, but I thought it was time for a little screencast.

This is how I do it:

1. Open your course in LCDS
2. Click the Media button in the toolbar to open the Media folder
3. In the Media window, go one level UP. This brings you in the Courses folder
4. Select all files (Ctrl+A) and add them to  a compressed folder (.zip)
5. Upload that zip file to your Learning Management System

Tired of using Notepad to plough through your logs?

Tom just released a new version of his SharePoint Log Reader on Codeplex.

This nice utility allows you to browse through the SharePoint ULS log files in a more convenient way. Some of the features:

• load multiple log files
• advanced filtering
• copy error message to clipboard
• support for correlation ID (SharePoint 2010)

Have a look at this short demo movie.

Recently, my colleage Pierre pointed me to this extension for Office 2007: UBitMenu.

It restores the classic menu structure of Office 2007 on top of the Office 2007 ribbon.

In the meantime, I got used to the ribbon navigation, it really has advantages, but sometimes it would be nice to have the previous menus if you can’t find a certain functionality you don’t use very often. Microsoft also offers the interactive command references to help you out.

The tool is free for personal use.

Recently, I had to produce screencasts that needed to be published/played in a Microsoft Silverlight player. I know, most people are still using the very popular Flash format, but sometimes there are reasons why you need to use Silverlight. For instance because it needs to be published on a Microsoft platform. ;–)

The trouble is that this requires your movies to be in .wmv format. Captivate currently ony produces Flash output (of course).

If you are starting from scratch, you can use a screencasting tool that produces .wmv files directly. You can use Camtasia Studio, or Microsofts Expression Encoder 3. This will give you a nice .wmv file that you can then embed in your authoring tool, or play directly with a Silverlight player (e.g. the free one on Codeplex.).

But what if you have tons of Captivate movies ready to be published? Or if you like Captivate better than Camtasia? Well, no worries, you can follow these steps:

1. Remove the “interactive” elements from your Captivate movies. This includes buttons, playback controls, question slides, anything a user can click on. This is important, otherwise your conversion will fail.
2. Publish your project  and get the .swf file.
3. Convert the .swf file to .wmv. I used Camtasia to do that (via Import media you can import an .swf file, and publish your project as .wmv), but I heard of other people using tools like Prism to do this.
4. Integrate the .wmv in your Silverlight authoring tool or in your player.
5. Done!

You can view an example of the final result. Requires the Silverlight Player (duh!).

Any tips or tricks? Share them in the comments!

I was watching the interview of tennis player Yanina Wickmayer where she explains why she did not fill in her whereabouts in the ADAMS computer system. As a result, she got suspended for one year.

I do not want to take any position about this decision (there are enough Facebook groups that do that), but this story reveals some typical problems that need to be addressed when introducing a new software tool:

• Communicate clearly: the “business rules” need to be communicated clearly, so that the user knows the policy and guidelines. For that, you use the proper way of communication with your users (oral, e-mail, …) Sending letters to the home address of a globetrotter does not fall under “proper way of communication”.
• Motivate: if your users know the philosophy of your application, why it makes things easier and what the benefits are, chances are much higher that the tool will be accepted.
• Make it look nice: while applications are judged by IT people on their functionalities, the end users have a lot of interest for the “look & feel” of the application. If it looks good, your application will “sell better”.
  The ADAMS application does not look very sexy at all, have a look at the brief demo.
• Leverage technology: a web application is a good choice for a global, world wide application, but “a pc connection to the internet” does not seem to be always available to the sporters. But I’m sure they all have a Blackberry. Why not make a mobile app?
• Train and document: the ADAMS application is a great example where the use of e-learning would be very appropriate: lot’s of users, spread over the entire world. Short demos, faqs, procedures…
  The only thing I could find on the net is a Captivate demo. Now, there is nothing wrong with Captivate as a tool, but providing a 30-minute animation for people who just want to hit the ball hard, is like torturing them. Why not provide brief, task based animations? After 15 minutes, the animation starts to explain how to fill in your whereabouts, and continues for at least 10 minutes…

WADA, Vlaamse Overheid, if you need any help, let me know. I see it as my contribution to Belgian top tennis.