Flowgram is a really nifty new, Flex-powered service that takes Web-based demonstrations to the next level. I don't get impressed by many training tools any more as I've been exposed to way too many that do the same thing in less and less interesting ways. Flowgram isn't just a screencasting or video demonstration tool. It actually brings up the Web page that you are trying to demonstrate. It's the full Web page and the viewer can interact with the page because, well, it's live!

This goes way beyond simple screencasts where you can watch, but not participate. It's much closer to what you can achieve with Adobe Captivate in terms of providing training for desktop or Web-based applications. Because you're dealing with live Web pages, you will run in to the issue of logins preventing users from getting inside a site that requires authentication, but theoretically, you could show them how to create and account, log in, and go from there. Captivate's simulation mode works around these issues, but you have to deal with changes to the Web pages you're demonstrating in Captivate, which can be time consuming and expensive. (Granted, Captivate can do a whole lot more, including branching, which isn't even in in Flowgram's playbook.)

You can also add in annotations to the Web pages you're demonstrating, add still images, pull from Flickr and and Facebook image sets, import PowerPoint files and then mix it all up.

The service itself uses a Flex app with and a whole lot of <iframe>s to get the job done, but the experience is really quite seamless and really darn interesting.

Like all Web-based services, there's the Flowgram branding and site redirection that you pretty much can't get around, and, of course, you run the risk of your content going away if Flowgram goes away. It is, however, a really interesting service for those looking to create Web-based demonstrations of (mostly) Web-based properties. I'm definitely going to be using this for some of my future training content creation, though I'll still rely on Captivate for demonstrations of desktop-based applications.

Larry Lessig, of EFF, Creative Commons and Net copyright battle fame, gave an excellent talk at TED in Monterey, CA, earlier this year. In this talk, he makes a pretty good, common sense argument about how the law is trying to strangle creativity. More interestingly, and the part that spoke very clearly to me, was how the law was corrupting our culture and turning many of us, especially those on the younger side of 40, in to those who live their lives against the law.

His argument (and, again, watch the 20 minute video, as it's excellent) is that the law, buttressed by conglomerate lawyers, proactively seeks to punish those who remix and rebuild content in to something new. He's not defending those who steal content outright and sell it as their own (which he should not). The side effect of this is that this strangling of creativity has a corrosive effect on our culture, and that it is raising an entire generation who live their lives (at least their creative lives) against and outside the law. If you post something on your MySpace page or make a hilarious video remix and post it on YouTube and use someone else's (copyrighted) content, you're breaking the law. But this (and this is critical and key) is how many, many young people communicate their lives. As such, they begin to see their lives and the key ways in which they communicate their lives (their photos or music on MySpace) as against, or outside, the law.

As a gay man who can still get fired from my job without any legal protection in 26 states and who can get jailed or killed in many parts of the world for holding my husband's hand, living against the law is something I'm familiar with. Until a few years ago, I could be arrested in any state in the country for having sex with the man I've chosen to share my life with (and in some parts of the country, men still are, even though it's clearly in violation of U.S. law). Living against the law diminishes you as a person, and, in very subtle ways, it makes you devalue your contribution to society.

In a culture where thugs are glamorized and where more and more youth express disaffection with the simple fact of work and societal contribution, anything that directly forces them to live against the law because they want (or need) to express themselves in the medium that makes the most sense for them is both troubling and disturbing. If society, represented by its laws, says "You are not allowed to be yourself, to express yourself, to share and communicate and collaborate about your life in any way that we don't expressly proscribe," why would people want to participate in that society? Where will the next generation of artists come from? What great stories will go untold because we aren't allowed to tell them?

Again, like Lessig, I'm in no way advocating wholesale copyright infringement. That's just not cool. Artists deserve (fair!) compensation for the work they create. But the impulse to create, to contribute back to the community, to make everyone feel welcome and whole and part of society, should be our priority, rather than embedding in generation after generation the idea that their only life is one that must be lived against the law.

I may not be the best player in WoW, but I do play quite a bit. I talk about it with my friends, much to my partner's chagrin, but here's how you know I'm a WoW geek: I let it seep in to my work all the time.

In addition to developing some pretty mean Web apps for eLearning at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, I also end up doing training for some of those apps. I'm a decent public speaker and if you have a technology person who can also communicate clearly and enthusiastically with the user base, you've got someone who's in fairly high demand.

So I'm prepping some training materials for a quiz/assessment tool that we're rolling out, and all of my example questions have to do with WoW. The screen shot on the right shows this (if you can actually read it). I'm curious to see with this new training material if anyone actually gets the references.

When a new content-creation solution gets rolled out in online course systems, I've seen a tendency at many higher-education institutions to try to turn the tool into the solution for every problem or perceived problem in online courses. Take, for instance: Macromedia (now Adobe) Breeze. It's an awesome product, and we use both Breeze Presentation and Meeting in our online classes.

Since we've rolled out the tool, however, some people see it as the solution to all of our content delivery issues. Some examples:

"Can't we add some videos to the Breeze presentations?" Well, sure, but is that the right environment for delivering 6 minute videos when Breeze only does progressive download of videos? "But it sure would be nice for the students to watch videos inside the lecture presentations. See what you can do."

"How about if we move our exams out of our testing system and in to Breeze presentations? They can do basic testing, right?" Well, yes, they can, but is that really the right environment to deliver exams? You'll have to give up things like randomization, pulling from a question bank and a bunch of other things that our testing system can do. "Oh, well, it sure would be nice for the students if they could take their quizzes right after they watch the lecture all in the same place."

"Can we put the lab exercises in to Breeze? Breeze makes everything look so nice and it looks more like how it looks in Word than HTML does." Well, I suppose you could, but is converting 7 printed pages worth of text, tables, and images directly into PowerPoint and then Breeze really the best thing for learner comprehension? "Well, the students are very used to Breeze, so it would be nice to have things presented in a familiar way."

I'm not knocking Breeze, really. I've seen this happen with tools we've built (assessment/testing systems, simulation builders, file storage and organization tools, etc.) as well as with other tools pushed out across the educational enterprise.

It's great that some faculty and staff will push a tool to its limits and try to get it to do things it was never really designed to do. But there's a big difference between what you can do and what you should do.

Make sure that the tool is right for the job. There's a saying in software development that goes "If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." Now, some people could level that accusation against me, and they wouldn't be totally off-base, because I use ColdFusion for all of my development work. (Because CF lets me get a lot more done in a lot less time than say, JSP/J2EE, or PHP, or, heaven help me, ASP, and is really quite robust and has nifty stuff built in for rich forms, speaking to Java/J2EE systems, pdf generation, and truly allows for rapid application development.) That said, I also know that as wonderful as a given tool may be, it's not always going to be the right solution for every eLearning problem. You have to mix and match best of breed tools, and then you'll have something that works well, makes sense, and provides a truly rewarding learning experience for your users.