The Riddle of the Excluded Middle
Last week I spent three days at Elliot Masie’s Learning 2008. Elliot’s events are usually a well-balanced mix of learning, technology, networking, and entertainment, and this was no exception. I had fun, connected with great people, and had interesting conversations. Yet every year I leave a little less satisfied, and this was no exception in that regard either. I think I know why.
What I realized after the event was that there are two conversations going on. One is the conversation about about the future and the technology that will shape it. It is all about social networking, Web 3.0, High Definition Video, virtual worlds, and the like. It’s where the techies want to live and the pundits want to go. The other conversation is about the mundane reality of accompbishing vague missions and herculean tasks with limited resources and the tools we have. This is the conversation of shared experiences, commisseration, and practical solutions. Both conversations are important, but the problem is that no one is talking about how to get from where we are to where we want to be.
The assumptions seem to be that either (A) the future will happen and the present doesn’t matter or (B) the future makes a great book topic but it’s someone elses’ problem and it doesn’t make my problems go away. Both of these are natural stances, but what is so striking is that in the learning industry they seem to be the only stances. I have experienced this at standards meetings, in the board room of companies, at Masie events, and from customers. Where are the bridges from the problems to the solutions, from the recent past to the near future, and from workable strategy to suitable tactics? Why does this seem to be the Excluded Middle? My intention (which is perhaps just pavement on the road to nowhere) is to explore this theme from several different aspects, and I invite your comments and contributions.
- Robby Robson -
HTML Code in MXML
I wanted to add a bulleted list (e.g., <li> items) to a text control in my MXML. I looked at the Adobe provided reference on using the htmlText property, but found some odd behavior using the examples. It appeared that whitespace in CDATA sections containing the HTML was causing odd behavior in the design view of Flex Builder 3 and in the published SWF.
The reason for this is that Flex does not condense whitespace surrounding CDATA sections. I overlooked this statement in the beginning of the document and was surprised that this was the default value and further surprised that the examples didn’t condense the whitespace.
Here’s the statement in the reference:
If you specify the text in a CDATA section, you can use the text control’s condenseWhite property to control whether Flex collapses white space. By default, the condenseWhite property is false, and Flex does not collapse white space.
Hopefully you’re a more careful reader than I am or are already familiar with the condenseWhite default behaviors. If not, I hope this helps.
Kicking off the Standards
Creating and updating digital learning content can be a daunting task.
All of us involved in creating, updating and migrating eLearning content from old proprietary black boxes into the latest standards and open formats knows what a mess of spaghetti tying up all the lose ends can be.
Through this blog we hope to share our trials and tribulations in these and other endeavors in order to expand the knowledge base of our industry. Within these walls we have veterans in SCORM, LOM, standards boards, Authorware, Flex/Flash, and metadata generation.
Now, if I can pry them away long enough to share some valuable nuggets of info this site will become a great resource in the months to come.