Podcasting with Industry Luminaries: Xyleme Discusses Learning Methods with Industry Expert Dr. Ruth Clark

Xyleme® Inc., the leading provider of 100% XML, SCORM 2004 certified learning solutions announces the latest podcast in the education industry series, Voices, which features interviews with today's top analysts, consultants and practitioners in the field of learning.

In this podcast, Dr. Ruth Clark, a recognized specialist in instructional design and technical training, discusses her work on evidenced-based guidelines for instructional modes, methods and media. Specifically, as it relates to creating visuals.

Dr. Clark uses empirical evidence to discuss the impact of visuals on learning. While relevant visuals can improve learning up to 90%, ineffective visuals often serve no useful instructional purpose and can actually impair learning. Dr. Clark provides examples which explain how relevant visuals successfully illustrate the relationship among lesson topics and explains in what circumstances text and/or audio should be used to describe these visuals. She also takes time to discuss her new book, the third edition of Building Expertise to be published in September 2008.

"With the May series, Voices has now reached over 1500 podcast downloads," said Dawn Poulos Vice President of marketing at Xyleme, sponsor of the podcast program. "We continue to see a high level of interest in hearing compelling content from the industry's thought leaders wrapped in engaging communication."

Voices is committed to providing a comprehensive, unbiased discussion of topics pertinent to the training industry. The series is ongoing with new podcasts to be introduced each month. In April, the podcast series featured Elliott Masie, founder of the MASIE Center, and Dr. Conrad Gottfredson.

Voices podcast library is located at www.xyleme.com/podcasts. All individual podcasts are available for download and comments. The library also provides links to our participants' web sites as well as links to any materials mentioned during audio podcast.

Microsoft unveiled PKS through its CodePlex open-source community at the Enterprise 2.0 show, which kicked off June 9, in Boston. The program goes into full swing Tuesday morning with presentations from FedEx, Google, Socialtext and other players in the space.

Companies use podcasting technology to provide company news, conduct new employee orientations or to boost career training or e-learning.

Rob Curry, director of Microsoft SharePoint, told eWEEK Microsoft's sales organization implemented the PKS internally over the past year, accessing audio or video podcasts on PCs, Windows Mobile devices, Zunes and any other devices that play podcasts.

Consulting giant Accenture participated in the PKS pilot program along with its client BT Group to offer Web 2.0-based learning and collaboration software. Roughly 50 other enterprise customers are testing PKS through the companies TAP (Technology Adoption Program).
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PKS can do quite a bit. Users are also able to connect with podcasters via integrated instant messaging programs and use a rating system, tag clouds and search functions to find podcast content. Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds to receive automatic podcast updates and play podcasts in real-time using Silverlight and progressive playback.

Future versions of PKS could include a rich Windows mobile client; a three-dimensional user interface to run on Vista; cross-OS podcasting client (in addition to Zune software); embedded video and audio capture and editing; Peer to peer media playback and downloading; Windows Live ID and Windows Live Messenger integration; and compatibility with Flash—in addition to Silverlight.

Why podcasting? Why SharePoint?

That Microsoft would add podcasting tools to a collaboration platform like SharePoint makes total sense; but what can be gained by open sourcing a tool that is already free for users who license SharePoint?

Curry said PKS is a great way for companies interested in e-learning to get started, noting that there are over 100 tools for the platform available under open-source through CodePlex.

Microsoft can certainly afford to make freeware part of SharePoint; the company has sold 100 million licenses for Office SharePoint Server 2007 for $1 billion in annual sales.

PKS comes concurrent with a flock of new partnerships Microsoft has inked with smaller startups looking to leverage the wild success of SharePoint, which offers knowledge workers social computing, blog, wiki, RSS and mashup tools along with enterprise content management and search. SharePoint competes with Lotus Notes and Domino, and Google Apps, among other tools.

Awareness, Atlassian, WorkLight, NewsGator, Leverage Software, BlueKiwi Software, Connectbeam, Telligent Systems and Tomoye, are integrating with the successful platform in some way or another.

All of these vendors, many of whom are participating in the Enterprise 2.0 show this week, are eyeing an enterprise social computing market that Forrester Research claimed will increase from $764 million in 2008 to $4.6 billion by 2013.

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