Tuesday 4 October 2005

Hard SCORM and Pocket SCORM

I am at Advancing ADL through Global Collaboration Forum today and next two days.

I saw a very interesting demonstration of "hard SCORM" and "pocket SCORM" by a PhD candidate from Taiwan, Mr Te-Hau Wang.

Hard SCORM refers to SCORM content printed on dead tree. What was interesting is the integration of book-based content with web-based content. By using a hand-held OCR reader (called Hyper Pen), a learner will scan the printed pages when she turns a page, she also scan on printed symbols on the paper to activate media which is delivered to the computer screen. Hey, who likes to read off long articles from computer screens? That's an interesting solution.

I remembered about 10 years ago, there was a "live book" project where bar-codes were printed at different places on a dead-tree book. User scans the bar-code to retrieve sound files from the computer, or indicates selection of answers.

Pocket SCORM is delivering SCORM content to small screen devices such as pda, mobile etc. In order to avoid scrolling both horizontally AND vertically, the content needs to strip of most graphics and re-flow in order to allow a single scroll direction. Nice!

Yes, he also presented "Video SCORM". The idea was to use television (digital televison) as the delivery platform. Learners can move between screens using a remote control. Is that edutainment?

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