Adobe Education Leaders

The new Adobe Education Exchange is a web-based community that allows people to collaborate, share resources, network, and generate ideas and discussions around using Adobe solutions in and around the classroom.

Members of the Adobe education team, along with input from a group of Adobe Education Leaders, have been working on this project for months and are thrilled to announce that the project has now been officially launched and is available for anyone to access and use!
This is a resource for all facets of education: K-12, Higher Education, Colleges, Universities… admins, faculty, staff… whoever is working with Adobe technologies in education.
You can see a small subset of materials and resources available by visiting http://edexchange.adobe.com/, but to truly get the most out of this resource, you will want to sign up with your Adobe ID and fill out your personal profile.

Finally! Enough iPhone stuff! Time to talk about AIR for Android!
I have two applications I’m working on right now, one is a screen sketching application and the other is an educational application that allows art history students to casually study images with metadata through a mobile interface.
My examples are a bit different from those you’ve probably seen around the web lately, as they are not games but creative tools and educational study aids. I didn’t have anything built for iPhone as most prerelease testers had, so this is all pretty much from scratch over the past few days and VERY primitive, yet I believe this speaks to the effectiveness of the platform that I was able to produce two viable tools in my spare time in a matter of days. Nice.

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SketchNSave [http://vimeo.com/11036849]
SketchNSave provides a canvas to perform simple sketches on your Android device using a variety of colors and nib sizes. I’ve added an interesting effect where as different strokes are applied, older ones will fade and blur into the canvas and newer strokes remain distinct and crisp. A user can clear the canvas at will, and even save the image to the device camera roll.

http://inflagrantedelicto.memoryspiral.com/2010/04/air-for-android-sketchnsave/

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StudyShuffler [http://vimeo.com/11070417]
StudyShuffler provides a casual interface for Art History students to access study materials on the go. Students simply plug in their DU ID, select a gallery of images to pull from, and then proceed to study each image one at a time. To view image metadata, simply touch the card to flip it. To proceed to the next image, just give the mobile device a quick shake!

http://inflagrantedelicto.memoryspiral.com/2010/04/air-for-android-studyshuffler/

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AIR for Android: OMG This is Cool!
So I’m writing this post a number of days before I’ll have NDA clearance to publish anything regarding Android for AIR. Just want to record my first impressions here!
http://inflagrantedelicto.memoryspiral.com/2010/04/air-for-android-omg-this-is-cool/

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Go, AIR for Android! Go, Flash!

“It’s a dumbed-down, sealed-shut device designed to make its owners into passive consumers.”
- Cory Doctorow

So I was recently asked something to the effect of
“I am trying to decide if I need an iPad and have been reading mixed reviews with regards to the ability to use them at various Universities. I’m personally pretty Mac-resistant, but I don’t have a terribly good reason for it. Other than that they’re expensive and want to kill Flash and have some of the most irritating marketing EVER!”
I believe that I gave a fair and reasoned response to the question and present it here for anyone else that may be in need of an opinion around this subject.

So while on the surface, a lot of people are thinking that students will be able to have all their textbooks on the device, you need buy-in from all the assorted publishers and I do not see that happening.
The largest downer though, as you implied, is that there is no support for Flash or even AIR… rendering educational tools like VoiceThread (and our own CourseMedia system) useless on the device. A lot of educational tools are built in whole or in part upon the Flash Platform and Apple is blocking them as well as anything authored in Java, Lua, Mono, Unity, et cetera…
On the other hand, we see a slew of Windows 7 and Android tablets being readied for launch with the additional promise of Chrome OS tablets. Microsoft is being a lot more open lately, and Google/Android is a no brainer in that regard. In fact, Google recently announced that Flash will be integrated into their Chrome browser and (one would assume) all Chromium projects, while Google, Mozilla, and Adobe are working together on a new plugin architecture that will elevate content such as Flash to the level of HTML and JavaScript in the browser.
On one hand we see a bunch of great tech minds working together to open up platforms and make the computing experience better for everyone (and this will translate onto the upcoming tablets based on Android, Chrome, and the like) – on the other hand we have closed off, expensive, limiting Apple products.
Part of the university experience should be about exploring and studying the world around us- being open to different technologies in such an environment should be no different.

I’m sure there are plenty that would disagree with several of my points in this opinion piece. I’m open to that.

At the University of Denver, we’ve been using the Flex 4 framework for a number of smaller projects (over the course of the development of the new framework) and now that Flex 4 is final, we’ve also begun working it into our CourseMedia™ application.
The first tool to benefit from Flex 4 is our CourseMedia™ Arrangement Tool:
The old arrangement tool is actually a leftover from DUVAGA which was updated to work with DUVAGA2/CourseMedia™ when we made the transition to video and such a few years back. For the more technically curious; the old arranger was written in originally written in ActionScript 1.0 (!) and really requires an update for many, many reasons.
The new Arrangement Tool is built on the open source Flex 4 framework and users will immediately notice it to be much faster at processing information, making database calls, and soforth. We are actually rendering bitmap data from video feeds and text slides as well, while preserving the thumbnails created within CourseMedia. This will allow for much simpler item reuse in this tool and hopefully others down the road.
While grabbing the input frame for a video clip may seem to be the best idea, in our testing we noticed that many clips at the beginning of a film began with a series of black frames. This is obviously no good for thumbnail generation. What we decided was to determine the frame precisely between but the start and end frames for any given video clip and render that frame to be used as the video thumbnail as illustrated below.

Here is a functional overview video of the Gallery Arrangement Tool used in the University of Denver CourseMedia™ Course Media Management System:

Benjamin Zenner, a student at the University of Denver, has come up with a project to monitor energy consumption at the campus residence halls and display the information to students using a touchscreen interface.
The electric meters at five University of Denver residence halls are equipped with data collectors that transmit electrical consumption to Northwrite Inc. at 15 minute intervals. This data is then passed back to DU systems through a ColdFusion web service which sorts and stores the data within a local MySQL database. When one of the five residence halls is selected, this Flash-based web application makes queries against the database and plots the energy usage in kilowatt hours (kWh) over time for the residence hall.
My department became involved when the time came to put the pieces together. We needed to work with the energy monitoring company (Northwrite) to provide them with a WSDL to submit metering data to. We set this up in ColdFusion and parse out the data to be submitted rto a MySQL database that the Flash-based energy kiosk feeds from.
You can check it out at http://ctl.du.edu/energy/
Hear Ben talk about the project at about 1:14:

With all the nonsense being put out in some circles placing HTML5 and Flash content at odds with one another atop highly exaggerated claims that HTML would “replace” or “phase-out” Flash within the next few years (what?), it might be heartening for those students looking to work in the field of RIA to know exactly where they stand with current job trends.
I was alerted to a recent study of indeed.com data made by Jonathan Campos that I believe should give future graduates a more solid outlook if they’ve been at all rattled by the recent debates.
Some of the highlights are revealed in the following charts (keep in mind that July 2009 is probably the height of the current global recession):

We can see from the graph above that Flex is still the leading RIA technology. Sure, Dojo (representing the HTML/JavaScript area of RIA) is doing nicely as well- but HTML/JavaScript and Flash are complementary technologies and in no way supplant one another aside from their specific strengths and weaknesses.

Happily, we see here that practitioners of RIA technologies still get paid nicely for their work.
Students- you have nothing to worry about. Don’t let the trolls frighten you!

The University of Denver Center for Teaching and Learning is holding a conference this Friday the 29th on “Education and New Media“. We are going to be streaming two keynotes by Michael Wesch live via Flash Media Server and invite you all to attend the discussion through a special app built for the conference that incorporates the live FMS stream, conference Twitter feed, and Google Analytics.
Remote participants can log in and post to the feed via the app – built entirely in Flash:

The idea behind this app is that conference participants (and those from afar who have interest in the keynotes) will be able to participate in a collaborative conversation through the Twitter feed while watching the keynote all through a single interface.
To accomplish this, I’ve employed Sandro Ducceschi’s very cool Tweetr AS3 Library for interfacing with the Twitter API. This is employed for both pulling all tweets marked with “#CTL2010” and allowing users to authenticate into Twitter and post directly from the app. The feed is refreshed every 60 seconds.
On the video side of things, we have employed the university’s Flash Media Servers and are tracking stats via Google Analytics Event Tracking API (which I have previously presented about for FITC). This results in a really nice (and functional!) showcase piece for using new media through the integration of a variety of systems and services.
To tie it all together, we’re using the open source Flex 4 framework and have made heavy use of the new Spark component set. The open source Text Layout Framework is used to render tweets along with my TwitterString class to interpret links, hashtags, and usernames.
I invite everyone to please spread the word about the conference stream. We’d like to have as many people participate in the discussion as possible!
Information about the conference follows:

The University of Denver is hosting an Education and New Media conference on Friday, January 29, 2010. We are very excited to have Michael Wesch as our keynote speaker. You are invited to join us for his keynote sessions via a live video stream. Virtual participants will have the ability to ask questions and share their comments via Twitter.
Michael’s morning keynote begins at approximately 8:30 and is titled, “How can we create students who can create meaningfully connections?” The afternoon keynote will begin around 12:15 pm and is titled, “Making connections: Experiments in Learning with New Media.”
Visit the conference webpage for more information and please feel free to share this invitation with your colleagues.
http://portfolio.du.edu/newmedia
Information about how to the access the video stream will be posted here soon.

Please spread the word!

“What you’ll find in the pages that follow is the output from the 2010 Digital Marketing Outlook survey which polled in excess of a thousand executives from major global brands, traditional and Digital agencies, vendor and service providers that operate in the Digital space, as well as freelance and independent Digital practitioners. The research has confirmed our outlook: many believe the future of Digital Marketing is exceptionally bright.”
Check out page 10:

Compared with last year’s report:

• Flash is still around 80%
• ActionScript is down a bit near 60%

Still an overall great showing for the platform, especially when compared with similar technologies.
Grab the full report.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak to a media distribution vendor who posed the question “Does your University have a mobile strategy?” Absolutely we do- at least my group of developers does. We’ve had the same strategy for a number of years now and that strategy is to hold and observe. This strategy will be modified slightly with the advent of Flash Player 10.1 for mobile devices next year to one of active, holistic, cross-platform development.

The vendor in question was visiting to inform us of their specialized video capture and delivery solution. This solution is heavily tied to the iPhone and Apple’s set of hardware and software tools. While this may be appealing to those students and faculty with iPhones and iPod Touches, the emergence of a number of Android-powered mobile devices deserves some real consideration, and the Windows Mobile, RIM, and Palm devices are nothing to dismiss either. If you target the iPhone today, you are greatly restricting the use of your application to one device out of many (which may be perfectly okay for some apps). I’d prefer to write my applications for the widest number of platforms and devices available since this expands the userbase and does not exclude anyone from using the tools I’ve worked hard to create. In a university setting which encourages open exploration of platforms, you need to remain as open and accessible as possible. The Adobe Flash Platform fulfills all of these needs in a platform-agnostic manner.
All major mobile platforms have their own version of an “app store” or “market” in which applications are developed and targeted for that specific platform. But what of current browser-based applications in use by students and faculty? If they are built upon the Flash Platform (as many are) then they have been effectively cut off from use on almost all mobile devices since, as of today, Flash Player is not widely available for mobile. HTML-based mobile apps may be one solution, but their capabilities are restrictive, and you must deal with a great number of cross-browser issues. Today- there is no good solution for this range of applications but to design them with mobile in mind… and wait cautiously for something better to come along.
At the University of Denver, we have a mature media delivery ecosystem (CourseMedia™) that absolutely requires Flash and AIR for even the most simple usage. Modern web browsers on mobile devices do a great job at rendering HTML-based web apps exactly as they appear on desktop and laptop computers… almost. The most sought-after missing piece of the puzzle is the Flash Player. With no Flash on these devices, web content delivery is severely restricted. There are platform-specific apps for audio and video delivery alternatives through popular services such as YouTube, but what of the plethora of applications that go beyond the simple viewing of video content? As things currently stand- there is no solution!
We are very excited about the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 release as this means that users will effectively be able to use the full toolset we’ve created to manage, explore, and display rich media objects on a wide array of mobile devices. If we do find the need to target Apple iPhone down the road, we can use the same Adobe toolset to compile apps specifically for that set of devices. While this is not ideal in the case of Apple (everyone I talk to desperately wants true Flash on iPhone), the fact that we will soon be able to “write once, deploy anywhere” is simply an awesome thought to ponder.

So what would be a likely scenario as Flash Player is released for mobile in terms of university usage? I envision faculty preparing media arrangements on their mobile devices while riding public transit with full video editing and annotation capabilities over their provider network. I can see students, later that day accessing this same content in a park or coffee house while studying for an exam that will utilize the same ecosystem through an AIR-based hardware projection system in an upcoming lecture. At first, we developers will not necessarily need to make many changes to the tools that currently exist, users will simply be interacting with mobile devices to do their work instead of sitting at a workstation. As time passes and needs arise, we will be able to modify our tools to better suit this approaching reality and create new tools specifically for these devices. As the hardware becomes more powerful and the Flash Platform itself evolves in the coming years, there will exist truly great opportunities that forward-thinking universities and corporations would be foolish not to embrace.
Our mobile strategy at the University of Denver CTL is strongly tied with the Adobe Flash Platform and the future of Flash on such devices is especially bright as 2009 draws to a close. Welcome, 2010 and Flash Player 10.1!
References:
Open Screen Project
Flash Player 10.1
Adobe Flash Professional CS5
Mobile Framework ‘Slider’

Last month, I participated in a phone interview with the education team at Adobe to talk about how the University of Denver is using Flash Media Server to stream both live and on-demand content across campus and out into the world. The resulting article was recently published on the Adobe Developer Connection website.

Topics covered include our CourseMedia™ system, live events, and various video uses across departments. It’s a fairly quick read and a comprehensive look at what DU is doing with media streaming using the Flash Platform.
Check it out: Q & A with Joseph Labrecque