[flashxmlengine] Re: Request for more information
- From: "Tenney Julian" <Julian.Tenney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <flashxmlengine@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:40:11 -0000
Hiya,
To answer John's questions:
- Can you provide me with a brief explanation of your role within the
Xerte project?
I am the lead developer on the project. I've designed and built all the
core functionality, and oversee the ongoing developments.
- What is the aim behind the development of this product?
To accelerate the development of rich, interactive elearning materials.
Flash is a great tool, but it has a very broad focus. Xerte aims to
provide a much narrower focus on the sorts of common issues facing
elearning developers, and to make it easy and quick to accomplish common
tasks. It also aims to provide a library of proven, tested code
available to achieve these tasks, and to provide solutions to difficult
problems like SCORM compliance and accessibility that are easily reused.
The aim is not to make a tool for non-technical people. Xerte is a
developer's tool, as it stands, but there's no reason why anyone out
there can't write editors for our XML format that are more appropriate
for less technical users and have the resulting XML play in our runtime
engine. On the other hand, you could code an .rlo file by hand in
notepad, so I prefer to think of Xerte as a sort of platform.
- Can you explain the main reasoning behind the decision to use Flash
technology and XML technology to create your product?
The flash player is ubiquitous, and offers all the functionality I need.
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of using these technologies?
I can't think of many disadvantages. The flash player avoids the issues
that arise from browser incompatibilities, and means we can maintain one
codebase easily.
- Did you consider using any other technology to create Xerte and if so
why were these rejected?
The engine would always have been a swf file. I did consider, breifly, a
dhtml solution, but was put off by the issues with different browsers. I
considered writing the editor in Delphi, but began putting it together
in Flash and things went quite well, so I carried on.
- Do you believe it is having a positive impact on teaching and
learning?
I don't think Xerte itself is having an impact on teaching and learning,
but materials created with it are. There's more to the materials than
simply the tool used to build them, and the impact on teaching and
learning is likely to be due to a number of other factors. What Xerte
does allow though, is to quickly prototype ideas and get them in front
of customers quickly.
- Do you believe using this product will impact on the future costs of
developing learning materials?
Yes. It is already. I've seen work done in Xerte in hours that would
take weeks using Flash alone. I demo'd Xerte to a group of developers
yesterday, and in miutes was able to create a simple application that
offered features they'd not been able to find in any other products.
- Did you have any reservations about adopting a system provided through
Adobe Flash?
No.
- Did the accessibility issues of flash concern you? And what do you
perceive to be the significant issues?
Flash is a lot more acessible than people think. I think the main issue
with accessibility is that there is no silver bullet. It needs to be
considered through the entire lifecycle of projects, and many developers
aren't thinking about it at all. Go to any flash based elearning piece
and try and navigate through it using the keyboard alone. Can you?
That's actually useful functionality for many people, not just those
with special needs. We've implemented some good accessible features, but
if developers using Xerte don't think about accessibility, their content
won't be very accessible. We really believe that accessible design is
good design for everyone.
- What are your plans for using this technology in the future?
Well, it would be great to move it all over to Flex, in ActionScript 3,
but there's a lot of work between here and there. I will continue to use
it to build all my content projects because it does everything I need it
to do, and when I find situations where a particular feature would be
useful, I can build it in. I'm very happy to hear from other users about
new features they'd like to see.
- What do you feel the impact will be of learning object repositories
such as Jorum? Do you feel Xerte will have a significant role in the
growth of repositories?
I think there's a long way to go before repositories like Jorum start to
have the impact they might. Reusability, in practice, is still quite
difficult. I hope that by enabling people to create standards compliant
content easily, that Xerte is helping to facilitate the reuse of
content. I think it's much more likely that content will be reused if
potential users can easily tweek / change the content, and Xerte offers
a number of ways to do that.
Julian
________________________________
From: flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of HILL, John
Sent: 14 February 2007 15:14
To: flashxmlengine@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [flashxmlengine] Re: Request for more information
Hi Julian
I have put together a number of questions regarding Xerte which
would help me gather some important qualitative data for my
dissertation. I would be very grateful if you could spend a small amount
of your time to answer these questions. Sorry I know you must be very
busy but it would be good to receive some feedback. I'm looking forward
to getting my Diss finished so I can start using Xerte and get back to
developing learning tools instead of researching and writing about them.
Thanks,
John
________________________________
From: flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of HILL, John
Sent: 26 January 2007 16:30
To: flashxmlengine@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [flashxmlengine] Re: Request for more information
Hi Julian,
Thanks for the quick response. I will take you up on your offer
of answering some of my questions. I will put together a couple of
structured questions and send these onto you in the near future and
hopefully I will be able to use the responses in my dissertation. Once I
get to grips with using Xerte I will probably have some technical
queries sometime in the future.
Thanks,
John
________________________________
From: flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tenney Julian
Sent: 26 January 2007 16:11
To: flashxmlengine@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [flashxmlengine] Re: Request for more information
Hi John,
Your masters dissertation sounds interesting, and Xerte
certainly fits the bill. I can give you more detailed information as you
need it, but here's some general info:
We've been developing Xerte since September 2004, and using it
for our own projects since then: the needs of real projects have
informed it's development, and we've covered so much ground now that
there's not a lot Xerte can't do. The design philosophy has always been
'make anything possible', and so we now have a very powerful set of
tools for developing complex interactivity.
Within our team we have now created around 50 learning objects
learing Xerte. Since we have made it available, it has been downloaded
about 1500 times, and our website is getting around 2500 hits per month.
There are no papers as yet, but it will be cited in some papers later in
the year.
Feel free to fire away with any other questions,
Julian
________________________________
From: flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of HILL, John
Sent: 26 January 2007 14:13
To: flashxmlengine@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [flashxmlengine] Request for more information
Hello to the designers of Xerte,
I have recently discovered your xml/flash editor at the
moment I have only had an initial exploration of the tool but it seems
to have the potential to be an important tool to build flash based
learning objects. I have recently completed a project using xml data in
a flash based tutorial, if I had had your product available at the time
it would have saved me some major headaches. I plan to explore the tool
in more detail over the coming months and hopefully use it for upcoming
projects. At the moment I am writing a master's dissertation in
Multimedia and the subject is the impact of XML and Flash technology on
learning tools developed for Higher Education, the Xerte tool is of
obvious interest to my studies. Could I please make a request for more
information on the product - for example have any papers been written
about its development or current usage, any usage figures would also be
useful.
Apologies for using this listserv to make contact but I
could not find a direct e-mail
Thanks for your time,
John
John Hill
Senior Learning Technologist
Learning Technology Support (LTS)
Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT)
University of Gloucestershire
Tel: (01242 71) 4611
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