Sharp Media at DevLearn 2009 and BYOL

Sharp Media will be exhibiting and presenting at both RapidIntake's BYOL (Salt Lake City, UT) and the eLearning Guild's DevLearn 2009 Conference (San Jose, CA).

Cahlan Sharp will be presenting two sessions at BYOL in October:

• Introduction to Flash: Just the Basics
  
• Advanced Flash

Cahlan will also be presenting two sessions this coming November at DevLearn 2009:

• Augmented Reality: An Overview of Applications for Education 
  
• How to Build Real-time Social Learning … Fast
  

Sharp Media is a sponsor and is exhibiting at both events. Stop by and say hello!

Sharp Media at eLearning DevCon 2009

The second week of June was a busy week at Sharp Media. We participated at RapidIntake's eLearning DevCon 2009 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Sharp Media was a sponsor at the event as well as a participant. Cahlan Sharp, Co-founder and President of Sharp Media, presented two sessions and two workshops at the conference.

The most popular session of those presented by Sharp Media was titled "The Bleeding Edge: How New and Upcoming Flash Technologies can Change Your Elearning." This session description was as follows:

"New technologies and implementations of Flash Player features are already having a great effect on the Flash developer community. So what's so great about them? How are they applicable to Elearning? And how you can you start to use them in your learning applications?

This session will give an overview of some of the latest buzzing topics in the Flash community including Augmented Reality, Adobe Flash Collaboration Service, Ribbit, Google Maps Integration, and more. Furthermore, we'll explore what possible implications these technologies can have for Elearning."

It was an exciting presentation that was delivered twice during the conference, and attracted around 20 attendees per session. You can view the link to the presentation file here.

Cahlan also presented a session titled "Interactive Touch-Screen Experiences with Adobe Flash and AIR," exploring some of the considerations and lessons learned surrounding a case study touch-screen kiosk deployment.

Cahlan's two workshops included a two day workshop titled "Using Adobe Flash to Create eLearning from the Ground Up" and a single day workshop titled "Beginning Adobe Flash ActionScript 3.0."

Article on InsideRIA

I just published my first article with InsideRIA about web analytics and Flash/Flex-driven applications.

http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/web-analytics-and-flashflex-dr.html

Web analytics in education is an emerging field, with lots of exciting possibilities. Although this article doesn't touch on the education industry, it does focus on helping you get started with web analytics in Rich Internet Applications.

Application of Augmented Reality to Learning Experiences

A new buzz in the web technology community has been the advent of Augmented Reality (AR), a technology that allows for the projection of 3D objects or displays onto a live web camera or other visual input device. This technology has been present for some time, but the real-world application of it is becoming increasingly simple and available. Recently, GE released a pretty amazing AR application that promotes their Smart Grid technology using Adobe Flash and the FLARToolkit.

I'm fascinated with the implications of these kinds of technologies on learning, and spent some time working up a proof-of-concept for a client that demonstrates the ability to use the technology behind AR not to project per se, but provide useful contextual information, when someone is browsing a book for example.

See the demo here.

Sharp Media Site 2.0 Goes Live!

We are extremely excited to launch our new SMID 2.0 website. With the new site comes a fresh look for our company as well as better resources for clients and future clients to gain an understanding into what we do and who we are.

It's almost a proverb of development studios to say "It's a good thing when you don't have enough time to finish your own web site." While that may be true for them, our old website was definitely lacking as far as updates and design touch. Our site needed a face lift, and it needed it last year.

But, we're happy it's finally here. We'd like to thank Dr. Pepper and all three or four of us who put in a little bit here, a little bit there, and finally a lot last week to finish this up.

>>New home page