The eLearning Guild just sent out a call for presenters for the upcoming DevLearn Conference November 11-14 in San Jose, CA. It's my favorite conference where I learn the most and it's fun to see what users are doing with Adobe Captivate. If you use Adobe Captivate and you have examples to show or best practices to share, become a speaker.
It's easy to submit a proposal for DevLearn 2008.
At the Annual Gathering of the eLearning Guild we have received lots of feature ideas and feedback. Our product sessions were packed and we had several members from our team in India here. They were conducting focus group sessions with attendees to get feedback about our ideas on Adobe Captivate 4 (I'll let you know through the blog, when the beta starts - will still be a while).
As promised, you can access my slides from the session at Session 410 Tips & Tricks Slides. (FYI: Some of the links are 'broken' because they go to files on my computer). A SWF sample is also included in one of the slides playing inside the presentation.
I guess our Tips & Tricks session made an impression - Check out Will Thalheimer's blog about the session - blogs like this make my day :)
At the session, we showed the new RoboHelp packager for AIR - imagine you can create a professional looking, standalone performance support system that:
Adobe AIR is quite amazing and recommend taking a closer look at it for eLearning.
Talking about AIR - I stopped by Brent Schlenker's session Scanning the Globe: Connecting your digital world to the world around you that focused on QR codes. One of the attendees pointed out the free QR code generator built in AIR.
So, here is a secret message - whoever comments first what is hidden in the QR code will receive a USB stick from me (please include your address/contact info in the comment) - my phone unfortunately is not yet supported and I don't have a reader on it, so I couldn't test this code ... I hope it works for you ;)
PS: The presentation slides are published via Adobe Presenter - it plugs in to PowerPoint to convert your slides to a very nice and quick loading Flash-based online experience.
I just returned from Seattle where we had a great Captivate user group meeting last night. I promised to make my slides available. This is a bit of a sneak peek for my session I'll deliver at the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering next week.
Thanks again to Mark and Matt for organizing the event. And thanks Bobby for attending and providing support :)
The questions and discussions at the end were great. By the way - the Pizza was really good!
PS: The presentation is published via Adobe Presenter - it plugs in to PowerPoint to convert your slides to a very nice and quick loading Flash-based online experience.
Our authorized training partner Lodestone is offering a unique class on Adobe Captivate - the Captivate Masters Class. This intense training week, where you'll learn anything from getting started in minutes to editing audio with Soundbooth or figuring out the LMS integration, will take place in New York June 9-13. 
If you register by May 1st, you save $100.
I just booked my flight to be there - I'd like to check out some of the sessions and meet with attendees and trainers. I hope I won't make the instructor too nervous and maybe learn some new tricks myself.
I'll be in Seattle on April 9th and will meet the Adobe Captivate user group. If you are in the area, please stop by. I'll also be presenting tips & tricks. More details to come on the Adobe Captivate user group website.
The eLearning Guild Annual Gathering is coming up soon and we'll be there! I'll be presenting an Adobe Captivate tips and tricks session on 4/15 at 4pm. These sessions usually fill up quickly - you may want to come a few minutes early.
There will also be some members of our team from India and they might even set up some focus groups - it's a great chance to meet them and give them feedback directly.
If you are planning to come to the conference, please add a comment in the blog. Maybe we can meet and chat about Adobe Captivate and eLearning and electric bikes :) See you soon.
Talking about events - Adobe is doing a Flex & Air Tour in Brazil where Ben Forta is speaking. The Adobe Captivate Brazil User Group will be there on March 25 in Sao Paulo. Ask for Fabio if you have Adobe Captivate questions :)
The European eLearning Summit was just announced - it will take place at Nottingham University in England August 19-21. If you live in Europe and can't attend the US eLearning Guild conferences, this would be the event to go to.
Adobe is a sponsor and there will be sessions on Adobe Captivate (The session schedule for the conference will be updated soon). eLearning Guild members will receive a substantial discount to attend.
Last week I spent in San Antonio to attend the ASTD TechKnowledge 2008 conference. I really enjoyed the opening session by David Pogue (I was really impressed how he handled a keynote speaker's biggest nightmare - fried hard drive before a presentation) - it was quite entertaining.
We offered several hands-on sessions on Adobe Presenter, Technical Communication Suite, and of course Adobe Captivate. (comment/blog from an attendee)
The Adobe Captivate sessions were packed every time - if you weren't able to attend or had trouble following along, you can download the basic step-by-step document I created and simply try creating a project 'at home'. Just play with it and have fun.
Download free 30-day trial of Adobe Captivate
The easiest way to start learning Adobe Captivate are the built in tutorials on the start page and you can always check out our online recorded sessions and live eseminars: Rapid eLearning Made Easy .
PS: If you tried to attend today's eseminar, please re-register for the next - I made a scheduling mistake and we are working to make up for it.
Last week we had our Adobe 25 year anniversary party and it rocked! It was held in a huge tent next to the San Jose convention center where John Warnock and Chuck Geschke kicked it off (Find out more about the Adobe History in the book Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story - I read it during our acquisition days).
The party was the best company event I have ever attended and was more like something you might have seen during the .com boom. The atmosphere was great and it's neat to see many people in person I only know through email.
There were also lots of cool geeky things: several Wii’s were set up (looks like you can still buy Wii's on Amazon - too late for Christmas?), Foosball, pool tables, Extreme BMX riders showing their amazing jumps, a guy that made soap bubbles, a creative drawing app in its own pavillion, and a fun Segway test ride (check out my alternATIVe blog why I prefer electric bicycles).
The big surprise was a Smash Mouth concert with a lot of their biggest hits.
Terry White did a great write up on his blog with really good pictures (Unfortunately I only had my Treo with me).
I just returned from Germany and I am now attending our annual sales & marketing conference. With the huge number of products we have, I am learning a lot about our own products. Here are some links I saw today I wanted to share with you:
Online Educa is over and my brain is suffering from information overload. Here are some random notes from the conference:
for resources like Wikipedia. Haven’t seen too many blog entries about it other than Wilfred Rubens’ who titles his entry “I am an ape” :) (FYI: it’s in Dutch though)
Some Flash apps I have seen:
PebblePAD - a fun way to create online portfolios. I enjoyed seeing this application since I am creating my own portfolio for the Educational Technology courses I am taking at SDSU. At 15 pounds/year quite reasonable, especially since it allows users to extract the content. So if you use it in an educational setting, your work is not lost if you decide to move to another system after graduating. It's easy to use and you can request a PepplePad test account.
Talking Letters – share your pictures with audio by adding your stories. Integrates with Facebook.
If you were at Online Educa, please comment your impressions.
I am off on vacation ... Bye for now.
I am heading out to attend and speak at the Online Educa Conference in Berlin. Horst Krieger from ipcenter.at will also be showing their work with Adobe Captivate during the session Serious Online Games in the Workplace (Harnessing the Power of Electronic Learning Simulations to Shorten Training Cycles and Improve Employee Productivity).
We are sponsoring a reception - hope to seeing you there!
During the conference I have heard two rumors and I'd like to let you know that neither is true:
1. Adobe is taking over the eLearning Guild
This one was quite funny to me and it makes me wonder, how rumors like it even start ...
Adobe has partnered with the eLearning Guild since the event was held in San Jose, head quarters of Adobe. We have been working with the Guild for so long already, we figured it's a great opportunity to tag on our first Adobe Summit for eLearning. We have no plans to 'take over the eLearning Guild.'
2. Adobe Captivate 4 will be released in Spring
This one would be an absolute nightmare if true and I would not have had time to attend the summit at all or any other conference or have a life. We just released Adobe Captivate 3 and our release schedules are usually 12-24 months. Adobe Captivate 3 seemed to be an exception with 9 months after version 2. To me, it was like catching up to our normal release schedule after version 2 was delayed so much due to the acquisition. Our team is currently in the process of gathering feedback to determine the best feature set for version 4. This is a good time to let the team know what you are looking for - go to Adobe.com and search for 'wishform' to get to the feature request form or use this direct link.
See you again next year!
I attended the morning session with Ellen and Tom King speaking to Authorware users about our plans. Brent Schlenker has provided a great summary. If you were not able to attend this session but you are interested in hearing more, we are repeating this session this week in an eseminar: Adobe Panel Webinar on Solutions for Authorware Users Register here.
We ended the conference with an interesting Stump the Expert session. I was the only expert though who actually got stumped by the audience asking very technical questions on Adobe Captivate (I am sure our QA or engineering team could have answered).
Questions were great and ranged from the future of standards or if Adobe is trying to sell an LMS (answer is no) to product related questions such as normalizing audio in Adobe Captivate.
Overall I really enjoyed the conference and already received some feedback from attendees that they got a lot out of it.
The Adobe Summit today was kicked off by Ellen's keynote with Naresh Gupta , our SVP, calling in from India in the middle of the night on a holiday! It was a great start of a very special conference to us since it's the first eLearning Conference that Adobe is holding.
Ellen also showed a video of our customers talking about our tools - Watch the video.
The Adobe Captivate Tips & Tricks session was quite packed and I was lucky to have RJ Jacquez join us, the Technical Communication Suite and eLearning evangelist. I learned quite a bit from his part of the presentation. Not covered in the PPT is his tip on changing the standard.htm file (found in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 3\Templates\Publish) which changes your published HTML file. I'll ask him to start a blog to explain it.
RoboHelp and FrameMaker are great tools for eLearning and several people were asking about the eseminars we offer - I recommend: Bring your Information to Life with 3D and Adobe® Captivate® 3 in the new Technical Communication Suite! - it's free, it's live and RJ will be presenting.
Right now I am in the executive panel session on technology road maps and it looks like attendees are interested in Flash Lite output (mobile important for about 5-7 ppl), standards support, video (1/3rd in the room develop video and several people want to do more than 50% of their content as video), a YouTube Learning type site (I rather would personally see a service like Adobe Share to turn into that - Share has the benefit of supporting interactive content so I think it's a bit more practical than a pure video service), collaboration (important for all).
Heading off to our reception ...
PS: If you leave a comment, please include a real name/address.
Right now I am presenting my session More then rapid where I show a multitude of rapid authoring tools including
At this point, I am showing how to blog with Contribute using my live Adobe blog. The demo includes inserting text by dragging a word document into your blog entry, inserting an image and inserting Flash files.
The conference will end with the Adobe Summit and we hope you can join us for that. Especially Thursday night: it’ll be fun with a beer and wine tasting reception. Find out more on our site – here is a demo how you get to the right page:
Here is a comment from Dave, one of the attendees:
"Silke is a wonderful instructor and this was a great session!"
Update after the session : I had planned a lot more tools in the session and unfortunately ran out of time. Thanks again Amy for playing with us with Visual Communicator and I am sorry that my system was a bit overloaded and slow. Here are the slides if anyone is interested in all the links. Heading to DemoFest now...
This was a long day ... but definitely a fun one. There are over 1,000 people here and everyone I met seems very excited and eager to learn and share.
As promised, here are some files and info from my sessions:
Breakfast Bite session: Is rapid eLearning getting a bad rep?
It was very refreshing to hear about the very successful rapid training stories where SMEs are involved. Thanks for all of you who attended this early in the morning and provided your insight in creating great eLearning using rapid tools. Here are some of your comments I jotted down:
I had mentioned this white paper we have recently done with Jennifer De Vries- it provides some tips and ideas on working with SMEs. FYI: Usually white papers are posted on our Adobe eLearnin
g site - we are adding this one soon.
Research in Action: Evidence-based Guidelines in e-Learning, a session by Ruth Clark and myself, was well attended. You can find her white paper directly on our website including some of the samples shown in today's session. I totally spaced in the session to thank Joe Ganci from Dazzletech who had provided a great conceptual simulation we showed. I'll blog when I can make it available online (see img on the right).
I also really enjoyed the keynote by Sir Ken Robinson - he is a very entertaining speaker and quite thought provoking. To get an idea, check this out (includes link to TED talk video). He definitely put things in perspective. Tony Karrer posted his notes.
With that - good night!
FYI - we are going to have a very interesting free eseminar tomorrow on best practices and case studies on involving SMEs in the authoring process. Jennifer De Vries has done some research on how Adobe Captivate is being used in some organizations with SMEs and wrote a very informative white paper with best practices for using Adobe Captivate with SMEs.
You can still register for the session
Gaining Efficiency with SME Adobe Captivate Use
Friday, October 19, 2007
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM US/Pacific
The white paper can be downloaded by session attendees. It is not available on our web site at this point.
If you register now but you can't attend, you should be able to watch a recording later and also download the white paper for the recording.
I am back from Training Tech Solutions. Overall I think attendance was quite down from the expected participation. It was a very small conference with the benefit that you meet a lot of people. For me personally, the best part of the conference was getting together with some speakers and sharing about the new stuff that's out there. I usually don't have time to play with the new cool toys so dinner was great to get up to speed. I did check out some of the tools they mentioned and liked this one: FlockPod - I'd describe it as a social network Web 2.0 way to run a debate about a topic with an option to vote if you agree/disagree with someone's point of view or contribution - if I ever catch up with my emails again, I'll try it out on my blog.
Bryan Chapman did several interesting sessions in the expo hall on choosing tools - I attended the sim tools one. He showed the shootout winners from 2005 (we had won) and 2007 (I didn't have a chance to participate this year). He separated sim tools into desktop tools and server based tools which I thought was a great approach. Your cost for a simulation authoring tool can quickly jump from $699 (CP3) to $20k plus for some of these server based tools.
More blogging about the conference can be found by Brent Schlenker and Rovy Brannon.
I did a hands-on session on Adobe Captivate 3 - there were only 16 computers and 28 attendees. It was quite tough to run a session where only half the attendees can really participate. I was trying to include some extra tips since 50% were existing users and these tips were often too fast/advanced for new users. It's best to split it up into two sessions which wasn't an option this time.
As promised, here are the PPT slides I used in the beginning of the session. Most of the other files and examples can be found in the Adobe Captivate Exchange.
I liked the option to attend a tour at the end of the conference and I joined the tour of Flight Safety International where we got a glimpse at the flight simulators. Quite impressive.
Next week is the Training Tech Solutions Conference in Salt Lake City where I'll be doing a 3 hour hands-on session on Adobe Captivate.
The organizers had sent out a note to speakers regarding free expo passes and a $200 discount:
FREE EXPO PASSES OR A $200 CONFERENCE DISCOUNT
As a special thanks to our speakers, you are welcome to share the special Training Tech Solutions 2007 discounts shown below with your colleagues and clients.
To obtain these discounts, just send your colleagues and clients to: www.TrainingTechSolutions.com and click on the Registration link.
Please instruct them to input VIP code TSSP1 for a $200 discount off the three-day conference or VIP code EXPS1 to receive a complimentary two-day Expo Hall pass.
See you at the conference :)
The Adobe MAX 2007 conference is coming up already next week. Here are all the Adobe Captivate related sessions:
The MAX conference will also be held in Europe and Japan. It's a fantastic event and a great chance to connect with other developers and designers, Adobe engineers and managers of CS3 and other products, and to see sneak peeks of upcoming technologies.
PS: If you wish to meet Adobe Captivate developers, join us at the DevLearn conference and the Adobe Learning Summit.
Just received an email from Elliott Masie's Learning Consortium with a neat Adobe Captivate demo that shows facilitated social networking. If you are planning to attend Learning 2007, I highly recommend you try out the networking tool by introNetworks. We had used it qite a bit at Macromedia conferences and it's a blast to find out who at the conference has similar interests or expertise. The introNetworks matches you with like minded attendees and allows you to contact other attendees about certain topics they are experts in. It's a fantastic networking opportunity I'll miss this year 
(we will have some presentations on Adobe tools and also Adobe Captivate).
Hope you have fun at Learning 2007.
The DevLearn conference Nov5-8 in San Jose is in full preparation and we are partnering with the eLearning Guild to offer a special Adobe Summit (Nov 8-9).
During DevLearn, I'll be presenting in two sessions: Research in Action: Evidence-based Guidelines in e-Learning with Ruth Clark and More than Rapid: Supporting User Created Content with Blogs, Podcasts, Vlogcasts, and More which is going to be a bit similar to what I have done last year. There will also be other sessions on Adobe Captivate e.g. Developing Uniformity in e-Learning with Adobe Captivate Templates and Captivate-to-Flash ActionScript Communication with workarounds on adding ActionScript to Adobe Captivate content. Just search for "captivate" in the concurrent session section.
I'll present during the Adobe eLearning Summit on CP3 and will show tips and tricks and some more samples our team has created. Probably the best session will be the closing session Stump the Adobe Experts where you have the chance to ask questions to product managers and engineers from different teams. We will have some people from our team in India there as well - it's going to be a great opportunity to provide your feedback directly to them.
Please also bring content samples - we love to see what you do with our tools. I look forward seeing you at the Reception Thursday night at the Adobe Headquarters!
You can register via the eLearning Guild website.
For those of you involved with initiatives that support the fields of technical communication, instructional design, help system development and elearning, I thought this survey might be of interest to you. You might want to take this survey or pass it on to someone that would be interested. I think the deadline to participate is this month.
Friday the 24th at 10am Pacific Time, we are going to have an eseminar with Dr. Ruth Clark as part of our Luminary eSeminars series. I'll join Ruth to show how to actually implement some of the principles in Adobe Captivate. The presentation is quite fascinating and packed with facts and samples based on the new edition of her book eLearning & the Science of Instruction - this is one of the key books I recommend when it comes to using multimedia in eLearning. We'll also try to make the session very interactive for you. Ruth has just published a white paper with us that covers some of the principles discussed in the eseminar. It's a short and easy read and very applicable to creating content with Adobe Captivate.
Friday, August 24, 2007
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM US/Pacific
PS: Another great resource for research-based elearning design is Will Thalheimer including lots of things you should know in his blog (for example bogus research data that is commonly cited).
The Education group at Adobe has invited me to speak at the summer institute where the Adobe Education Leaders are invited to meet, learn, mingle (and party - and they do it well!) My session was brief and I showed some examples including the podcast, a softskills simulation, and a quiz and also some of the new features. Several questions and feature requests were raised and I encourage you to submit your own requests. Adobe Captivate 3 is done and we are planning for version 4 - this is the perfect time to submit! Please include sample scenarios where/under what circumstance you would want a particular feature and why.
Among the many requests, I also heard avi output or a way to create DVDs so you can play content on TV. Is anyone doing this right now somehow with Adobe Captivate content and maybe another tool (e.g. convert using sothink's tools)?
I was also asked about game templates ... we do have a basic Jeopardy style game in the Adobe Exchange that was created by a user. Did anyone create another game with Adobe Captivate yet?
I'd love to see your examples ...
Today has been impressive and being a vendor, talking to customers and partners provides the most value to me. I have had a great lunchtime conversation with a consultant and a training manager for a large software company. Working for software companies, it was a surprise for both of us to hear from the consultant how often IT runs the show and makes business decisions for her clients. My problem is to reach SMEs since they are usually not in the learning field themselves and wouldn't even know a tool like Adobe Captivate even exists to make their lives easier - she responded that IT groups are a factor in that they don't want to control additional licenses outside the training group. I have also heard customers talk about limited bandwidth of 250k. It's tough for me to imagine a world where IT could limit the ability to do my job. Who is deciding what tools you use?
On the showfloor I heard the question on integrating games with Adobe Captivate - check out C3 Visuals. Their games work nicely within slides and I'll post a file once I have an example.
The last session I attended was by Fort Hill Company on accelerating the transfer and application of learning. It was more a sales pitch for their book The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development Into Business Results which is fine with me since I now know to better get it. They made a great learning transfer and application scorecard available - looking at the scorecard and assessing the Adobe Captivate sales training, I wished our own training folks were here ... There is a lot more we can do.
I had the chance to attend an event sponsored by Enspire Learning - a company I have always admired for the Executive Challenge leadership training they developed. If you want effective simulation based sales training, give them a call. I am working with them on some Adobe Captivate project sample projects we'll make available to you later this year.
I liked the world map with all the business cards from attendees posted on the different countries. It really showed how much of an international conference this is. Well done.
Not so well done was the conference event - they had a "party with the fish" at the aquarium and for $10 you could get a ticket with your conference pass. There was no indication that tickets would be limited so by the time I got in line, they were sold out. Oh - and then I heard rumors you got a refund if you couldn't get a ticket? For most people I know, going to a conference is work - it's training. Imagine you are offering bagels before you teach a class, except they are gone by the time learners arrive (and they are not even late) and you tell them the later they could have gotten donuts instead ... How will that impact your course evaluation?
This was a loooooong day ... started out with a session by Jim Collins who wrote the bestselling book Good to Great. I liked his book in the first place and the session was a good refresher but he is also now looking at organizations that dropped from Great to Good and the 6 stages a company goes through. A company might still do really well on the outside while on the inside things are happening that will lead to rapid decline. Can't wait to read the new book ...
One of his comments today really struck me - the question "What's on your NOT to do list". Might be a good topic to talk to my manager about ;) So, what's on your not to do list?
Spent the rest of the day at the expo which is far too overwhelming and so far I haven't seen anything striking new ... I'll keep looking.
Our booth had a lot of traffic and we received many Adobe Captivate questions - one of the top ones was: Where do you get training on Adobe Captivate. Here are a few links:
- Free online seminars
- Free online tutorials and tips
- Training partners
- Online training and basic work book
Mark Oehlert also has a detailed writeup about yesterday's sessions.
