Posts Tagged ‘development’

Web Widgets

// February 27th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // strategy, web development

I been thinking a lot lately, should I invest some time into creating an AIR widget/application or focus on what I know best.

Selecting parts of a Web site and it’s data and packaging it up to make it run inside a portable, user distributable widget has been growing more and more popular over the last few years. For example, WidgetBox currently distributes 74,000 different kinds of Web widgets from its partners to over 1.2 million other sites.  Widgets lets users distribute a Web site to other places on the Web at no extra cost and it also creates an ecosystem effect, where other Web sites users become the users of the new site.  The YouTube badge is a notoriously well-known example of this that also helped drive the extraordinarily fast growth of the site.  Like APIs, widgets are now considered a mandatory must-have for new and existing online products. But unlike APIs where it’s up to the API users, figuring out users want out of your site’s widgets is still an art form.

I also find that the Web development industry has been slow to change, particularly outside the valley, and there is depressingly scarce information on how to deliver well on things like widgets, open APIs, social networking applications, and even syndication.  So, what do you guys think I should do?

Designer/Developer, what am I? Kinda both really.

// February 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // rambling, web development

For those that are in the industry, know that Adobe had their Refresh 2010 last week. Well, from what I can see the industry, thanks to a number of companies including Adobe and Microsoft, has moved into skill segmentation—Designers and Developers—and you have every right to expect these guys to understand each other because they will be working in a collaborative environment. A Developer needs to understand what the Designer does, and his or her unique language, and vice versa. Post Secondary education, on the other hand, produces either one or the other because… that is what we do. They “train up” specialists that are either really great designers or amazing coders. The students spend a few years learning their craft in a rather cloistered environment and are rarely exposed to the skills of the other person in the equation. Which begs the question: Do design schools need to expose their students to code in a digital universe, and do code-centric schools need to introduce a design element into their way of doing things?

This isn’t a frivolous question. Adobe and Microsoft are developing some amazing tools that are slowly but surely moving what we do from the browser to the desktop. They are leading the charge into a web universe that is “rich” in every sense of the word and, as devices take hold, you can bet that your clients are going to start asking why you are charging them twice to develop a web application and another version for a mobile phone. We are living in an industry where “Standards”, “Ajax”, “Flex”, and “Spry” are neither adjectives nor cleaning products. While all of this is going on in your day-to-day business, educators are having real issues keeping up with you, let alone addressing the “Designer/Developer” question.

How they resolve it, though, has the potential of becoming a huge issue because students coming out of the universities have a skill set that sometimes doesn’t meet your current needs, and most likely won’t be able to meet your future needs either. I can see that there is a growing disconnect between the skills being taught in the classroom and the skills you need to possess in the “real world”. Don’t get me wrong, I am pointing out our experience not to rub it in your faces, but to get you thinking. What do you guys think should universities do for an industry that is also figuring out how this collaborative/multidisciplinary approach to Designer/Developer workflow fits into their business models?

Is now the time for e-learning?

// December 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // e-learning, rambling, strategy

We know the answer all too well: Frozen budgets, limited spare time and a desire for better balance between your personal and professional life make keeping your skills current a real challenge. The evolution from classroom instruction to self-paced e-learning in the late 90ies never quite delivered on the promise that people just learn by themselves without an instructor or coach to help them along the way. E-learning never became the “one size fits all” learning method we may have hoped for. Rather, it became only one of many learning options that are available for an efficient knowledge transfer. In the past few years learning specialists like me tried to overcome the separation of e-learning and physical classroom training by the creation of the “blended” learning concept. For those that don’t know, blended learning is basically an integrated learning approach blending different learning methods such as instructor-led and self-paced learning to create a holistic and role-based learning experience.

From my research, the latest addition to the blended learning family that has proven quite popular with many training providers is virtual live classroom training. This learning method adds an important new element, the live instructor, to the virtual learning options. In a typical virtual classroom training, the instructor uses web based connectivity to deliver the same or slightly adapted content as a student would receive in a physical classroom. The goal is to create the same learning dynamic of the bricks and mortar experience in a virtual environment. Many training organizations have migrated part or all of their physical classroom training to online instruction.

The typical virtual learning day is a continuous change from presentation to exercises to questions and answers to maximize learner’s attention.Capturing the learner’s attention seems to be the critical success factor of any efficient virtual learning experience. Besides the everyday challenges of our multi-tasking work lives, the question of how much online training we are able to digest remains open.There are many so-called virtual classroom training courses that actually are only just another type of webinar, i.e. with little or no participant interactivity at all. The differences and commonalities between webinars and virtual classroom training slightly blur the virtual learning method overall. Whereas both formats use the same technology there are some distinct differences between the two. The primary goal of a webinar is to share information to a large audience in a single direction (instructor to learner). On the other hand, virtual training is usually delivered in smaller learning groups with the purpose of achieving a tangible learning objective and has a more collaborative nature often with hands-on practice. Nevertheless, a learner may not always be sure what they get from a virtual training course and whether this is the best choice for a an efficient knowledge transfer.