OpenOffice Base Intro

What can I say? In my experience with OpenOffice Base over the past couple weeks, I have grown to not like it at all. I understand that its new and its open source, so it will probably get better. I just feel that maybe a little more time could have been spent on making sure it had more functionality than it does right now. While creating the modules, I noticed that you can't copy and paste records successfully, which is a huge problem when you have multiple records that may need to be moved. Also, no matter what order I enter my records, every time I open a table they come back different. Also, changing the primary key in a table proved to be way more of a hassle than ever, often resulting in having to drop an entire table and start from scratch. Maybe its just my version of the software that acting like this? Or maybe there wasn't enough time spent on developing this application so that it could accomplish basic tasks. I am finding it increasingly difficult to help somebody learn how to use this program when I don't want to use it myself! I know that may sound bad; however, I do understand that the software is open source, and I understand that it will get better as more and more developers add to the overall OpenOffice Suite. I never really knew or cared much about open source apps, but I now have the opinion that this software was probably released prematurely, simply to jump on the open source apps bandwagon and make the product known.

Content/Quality Reviewers

I wanted to comment on the quality review meeting we had last week in class. I thought it went well and many guidelines were established that I felt would really make our training materials look professional and clean. One issue I'm having though is, as mentioned in our meeting, the size and quality of the picture files that are included in this training. The argument for saving the pictures as a GIF file were that they would not use up too much memory. I am finding that saving the pictures as GIF files is taking away much of the color consistency in the pics; however, saving them as JPG files does not affect the picture at all, and the size difference is 30.1 KB for GIF and 41 KB for JPG. There is not a big size difference here and even if we had 1 million pictures total, that would just about reach 1 GB in size. I think the GIF is going to be ineffective and hard to read in the published training materials and JPG is provides great color and does not have a significant size difference so we should really go with that.

Intranets and Internet Learning Environments

In Chapter 24 of Lee & Owens, the idea of interactivity is established in Internet based learning. Internet training provides many advantages including easy accessibility, cost effectiveness, easy development. What is important to most businesses is that they use something that is already established, and modify it to meet their business needs; no need to reinvent the wheel! There are some differences when it comes to Intranet and Internet based learning. Intranets are internal to an organization, meaning they are protected and have a high level of security requiring users to log on to gain access. The Internet is highly public, accessible by all and is not as easily controlled as a private Intranet. Three primary reasons for the adoption of Intranet and Internet delivery are universal access, ease of use, and multimedia content. As a training designer, my biggest concern when creating a training program would be acquiring the skills necessary to develop something like this and also making sure that the trainees have necessary skills to access it. Also, you must consider the type of information people are able to access (videos or flash) and how fast their connection is to the Internet. I found something really interesting in this chapter because as I have grown up and used technology and heard all the jargon, I never new that the Internet and WWW were not interchangeable terms. The Internet is the backbone, or hardware on which the WWW is accessed. Interesting?!

My First Experience With Camtasia

For those of you who don't know, Camtasia is a recording software that allows one to capture motion on a computer screen. There are many features including recording, editing, and publishing videos. This program allows you to record training videos as well as integrates PowerPoint presentations. At first glance, Camtasia may seem a bit overwhelming, but after reviewing the controls, proves to be easy and fluid. We first had to set up audio by specifying a microphone and then testing the audio so the software could normalize the voice. Simply press the record button to record and the stop button to stop recording. The feature that I liked most about the recording software is that you are able to select a portion of the screen to record. This allows you to move around outside the recording screen and can possibly make for less editing. I am looking forward to learning more about editing recorded videos and making seamless video training for OpenOffice.org Base. New for Camtasia 5 is a tool known as screencast.com, which allows bloggers to record video, post it, and blog about it instantly. My only real question is how many organizations utilize this software to support training needs?

Chapter 23 Computer Based Learning Environments

In Chapte 21 of Lee & Owens, computer based training is described as cost effective and and provides many other advantages to traditional classroom learning. Yet companies still spend billions on facilitated instruction every year. Why? I believe companies spend money on facilitated discussion because of the human interaction. Yes, CBT may be effective and help trainees learn more in shorter amounts of time, but the value of sharing human experiences with fellow learners is worth so much more. Not only is CBT an economic decision, but it also factors in global displacement among workers as well as communication between them. How then will organizations be able to prove that CBT, while cost effective, actually is an advantage to traditional learning? I'm not really sure how this can be accomplished, maybe follow up reviews of job performance or review of production rates following training. I feel facilitated instruction should be an integral part of any training, and CBT should be there to help support it.

Gaming As a Form of Training

In Chapter 19 of Lee & Owens, the idea of using games as a method of delivering training is presented. According to the chapter, games that are carefully constructed situational games that are appropriate to all media that can have positive outcomes on training. With games, people can enjoy learning and will be more likely to retain information longer. What companies are using games as a form of training right now? I found an article online, in which a Cold Stone Creamery manager plays a video game that teaches employees portion control and time management. The military is one of the largest advocates for games as a form of training. Other notable organizations include Cisco and Canon. The article states that trainers are expecting the games to attract younger employees who are media-savvy. About 15% of games are non entertainment, in other words, used strictly for learning purposes. What are some of the advantages of playing video games in training environments? For one, games are cost-effective for most organizations and allow for training material to be shared among all employees. Games also provide a sense of interaction and repetitive training that most lecture based material can not provide, which in turn helps students retain more information. As a future employee, I would like to be able to utilize this form of training because to me it would make training fun. For me, having fun while learning leads to better retention of the material. Hopefully, more organizations will be turning towards games as a method of transferring knowledge.

Five Free Web Apps We Can't Live Without

In this article, 5 web applications are listed as the best and easiest to use. They include Ta-Da List, PBwiki, Google Docs, Bloglines v3 Beta, and Zoho creator. Ta-da list is an easy to use to-do list maker, which only requires simply typing your lists and that's it. There are no tags or categories, just simple ordered lists that can be created and saved so they can be accessed from anywhere. Next, PBwiki provides users the ability to make a free wiki as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich...catchy huh? The plus side to this wiki is that it is ad free. Google Docs has become very popular in recent months and allows users to upload docs and save them for later work. This office suite of Google Docs provides users with constant access to their documents over the Internet. Bloglines v3 Beta is just another RSS reader, or is it? Because it's in the beta version it still has some quirks to work out but offers easy access to news articles and provides basic functionality. Most importantly, it's easy to use. Zoho creator is a great tool to make your own database applications and provides only two page layouts but it can be embedded in web pages. All of these applications seem great; however, I have never heard of any of them except for Google Docs, probably because Google is such a powerful name. If I had to add any web applications to the list it would be the Google Reader which is a great tool to use if you are already using Google Apps. Also blogger.com, a Google application, is very popular and comes with many features that I like such as auto saving a blog and great template views. After reading this article, I will definitely have to use Ta-da lists and probably check out the Bloglines v3 reader.