Thanks Julian You have provided some excellent feedback - thanks again for giving your time to answer these questions. Your feedback also gives a clear overview of Xerte - which will help me promote the product to other potential users in my institution. Cheers John -----Original Message----- From: flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:flashxmlengine-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tenney Julian Sent: 14 February 2007 16:40 To: flashxmlengine@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [flashxmlengine] Re: Request for more information 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 This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses, which could damage your computer system: you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation. This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses, which could damage your computer system: you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.