Dude, Karl Kapp Mentioned Me In His Blog (My Social Media Story)

I’ve been blogging for a couple years now and using Twitter off and on… not much. I wouldn’t call myself a social media maven.

But at TechKnowledge, that brief SoMe resume plus participation in the backchannel was enough to give me a good introduction to Karl Kapp, Aaron Silvers, Cammy Bean, Ellen Wagner, Alicia Ruiz, Stevie Rocco, Kris Rockwell, Koreen Olbrish, Clark Quinn, Michelle Lentz, and Damon Regan… All great people with great minds and passion for learning.

Now, some of you won’t believe this, but I tend toward the shy side sometimes, particularly around people I really respect and haven’t met yet. My point? I never would have met these people if I hadn’t been using social media, or I never would have met as many of them, or I never would have established connections as quickly.

If that were all of the story, it would be good. But that’s not all.

Meeting in person adds a dimension, strengthens bonds, gives you the common ground of shared experience. And that’s a good thing. But there’s more.

I’m more active now on Twitter, blogs (including my own), and even Facebook. A few new friends have linked to my blog, which I always find thrilling. I’ve online-met even more people through the people I met in person, and maybe I’ll meet those other people soon, too. (Yeah, go ahead and re-read that. I’ll wait.) All of this activity is good networking, but it’s even better food for… as Aaron Silvers would say… ideation.

I’m tempted to wrap this up with a moral but honestly, I think you get it.

And if you’re reading this and we’ll be in the same place soon, get in touch. I’d love to meet you.

(Oh, and the inspiration for the title of this post: Lots of Fun at ASTD TechKnowledge 2011. Karl Kapp is a scholar and a gentleman who will one day succeed in teaching me the etiquette of spell-checker-to-client confidentiality.)

HTML5: Are We There Yet?

What an amazing week! I got home today from TechKnowledge 2011. I’ll likely post some reflections soon; for now, I just need to let the attendees to the HTML5 session know that a version of the presentation is now posted on SlideShare… and below:

[slideshare id=6825868&doc=fr104slideshare-110205184038-phpapp02]de

Also, thank you for your attendance and your involvement. You brought some great questions and I hope I can continue to help you (and the rest of our industry) sort through how this issue affects our work.

If you have a question or a suggestion for a future post on this topic, feel free to leave a comment here, on SlideShare, or on Twitter… or email me. Let’s keep this conversation going.

Update: Yes, SlideShare requires the Flash plugin, but I just learned that you can upload presentations to Scribd, as well as documents! Scribd is a document-sharing site that entirely rewrote its code in 2010 to display its content in HTML5.

View plugin-free on Scribd.

What Do You Need That HTML5 Doesn’t Have?

I’m preparing to speak about HTML5 at TechKnowledge and Learning Solutions soon, and so I’ve been reviewing some of the things being written about HTML5 in both the elearning and web development world. One of the criticisms of HTML5 in both worlds continues to be that it doesn’t have all the capability of Flash. This is true.

However, it’s also true (according to the eLearning Guild’s annual reports, anyway) that most of the elearning development world uses rapid development tools, and those don’t have all the capabilities of Flash either. So my open question to developers and designers is:

What do you need for your course development that HTML5 doesn’t provide?

Or, alternately, What do you need for your course development that you’re not sure HTML5 provides? If you ask a question along those lines, I will do my best to answer it here.