Do you use a SCORM 1.2 based LMS with Articulate Quizmaker content and wonder why your LMS is truncating the responses to essay questions to only 255 characters?

The issue is actually that the SCORM 1.2 standard only allows questions repsonses to be up to 255 characters.

If you have worked with Learning Management Systems and content authoring tools such as Articulate Presenter, Quizmaker, and Captivate you might have run into issues with your content integrating with the Learning Management System . Often times finger pointing will happen between the Learning Management System and the authoring tool. The LMS company will say it is a problem with the content, then the authoring tool vendor will tell you it is a problem with the LMS, but very seldom do people ever point the finger at the actual standard as the culprit.

The more you find out about the SCORM 1.2 standard the more you begin to realize how inflexible it really is.

Note: The finger pointing I am reffering to is mainly from my experience at Adobe/Macromedia. Finger pointing doesn't happen at Articulate :-)

Labels: SCORM

Here is another good audio article written by Ethan Winer:
http://www.ethanwiner.com/audiophoolery.html

It was an article published for Skeptic magazine, and it dispels some popular myths. He also explains in detail some of the common audio lingo such as Noise, Frequency Response, and Distortion.

Labels: Audio

Found a great website that has some information written by Ethan Winer where he discusses some popular audio myths:

Dispelling Popular Audio Myths

If you are heavy into creating great audio this is a must read. It is highly technical, but very interesting.

Labels: Audio

One of the few weekly emails/newsletters I get from stores that I actually make a point out of reading is Moosejaws's newsletter. Normally newsletters I recieve are filled with the same weekly specials that very rarely are interesting. Well Moosejaw's emails usually mention a sale or promotion going on, but then the owner of the company will add a note to each email telling what he has been up to, and it is usually hilarious. Here is the excerpt from a recent email from moosejaw.

I always take a vacation before we get super crazy during the holidays. Vacations are a rarity and something I look very forward to. I was going to change that sentence and write ..."to which I look very forward" but I didn't think you'd care. So I went on vacation to San Diego with the girlfriend and after fighting about it for seven minutes, I agreed to stay at her sister's apartment. I figured the two sisters would spend the whole time talking and I could just do my thing. Not sure what my thing is but I planned to do a lot of it. Anyway, the whole weekend was a disaster and it couldn't end fast enough. Yes, there was the non-stop rain but that was nothing. The sister had her boyfriend over the entire time! I didn't know she had a boyfriend and if I did know, there's no chance I would have stayed there. The weekend was one giant double date and I was left hanging with the sister's boyfriend. If you saw how
close I had to sit next to him on the tiny couch in the tiny living room, you'd feel my pain. I think we touched two or three times. If I knew him better I would have put a dining room chair between us. I don't have to worry about him reading this email because he's anti-technology. He thinks it makes the world too impersonal. I made a point to check my Blackberry every 10 seconds instead of every fifteen seconds which is more typical. Besides all that, I had a very nice vacation.

Check out the site if you get a chance. http://www.moosejaw.com/.