Last October, dominKnow Learning Systems released the beta of our Touch Learning Center Portal, which gives learners easy mobile learning access to content ranging from full online courses to individual Learning Objects and support documentation via the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Of course, the iPhone 3-G launch two weeks ago has spun renewed buzz about mobile learning, and a pair of recent reports show that interest in mobile learning is definitely in a growth mode, at least as far as interest in its possibilities is concerned.

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"Remember the e-learning!"

This new battle cry has replaced the classic "Remember the Alamo!" this week in San Antonio as the GeoLearning 2008 Summit on Learning & Performance has rolled into town.

Today marked the official release of version 5.2 of the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS), and the Summit was a great place to mark the occasion. dominKnow Learning Systems is the platinum sponsor of the event, honouring the six-year partnership between the two companies.

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Last year marked a turning point of sorts for the airline industry around the world, with the business overall earning $5.6 billion U.S. in profit.

There are a lot of factors adding jet fuel to the industry's growth, but they all up to one thing – tremendous pressure on airlines to find, hire and train staff to meet their growing needs.

Some reports suggest that 17,000 new pilots will be needed to be trained every year. Other reports suggest that 120,000 new pilots will be needed by the year 2017.

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When I talk about using Agents (or Avatars) in online courses, people sometimes give me a horrified look. I can almost see the shadow of Microsoft's Clippy in their eyes.

For those lucky enough to not to know Clippy, he was an obtrusive, paperclip-shaped help agent that would appear (at the most inopportune times) when using Microsoft Office applications. Clippy was notoriously hard to turn off and was exceedingly annoying. He was a good concept, just badly executed (Sorry Microsoft!). This has scared many people away from the idea of using Agents in learning.

But what exactly are Agents?

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Attend a hockey game here in the Great White North, and you may well hear O Canada sung in a mix of French and English. It's a boisterous exercise in bilingualism and a gentle reminder that we don't always speak the same language.

It seems fitting that as we roll out the new Language Module for the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS), one of the first available languages is French-Canadian.

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Next week the dominKnow instructional design team is off to the Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) conference in Toronto.

Of all the conferences of its kind that I have attended, the CSTD event is one of the best for the quality of the sessions. Since dominKnow offers a Learning Content Management System (LCMS) as well as learning solutions through courseware consultation and development, I have interests in many different areas. It is often difficult to choose a CSTD session to attend from amongst many worthwhile options.

If you're not familiar with CSTD, the conference is a great way to learn more. Our local Ottawa chapter recently held a great workshop on storytelling in the workplace, led by Jennifer Cayley and Lucie Roy. Sprinkled throughout the workshop were quotes on storytelling, leadership, and learning. One was from Alan Kay, the vice president at Walt Disney, who said, "Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories."

That's one of the things I look for at the conference... the opportunity to listen to and share stories with others working in training and development.

In previous years, I have come back to work with practical tips to improve workflow, write challenging assessments, motivate learners, and more. This year, I'm looking forward to keynote speakers David Weiss with Leadership Solutions, Ed Hoffman's Project Management and the Three Little Pigs: The Power of Stories, and Pamela Wallin's Cross Border Connections as well as sessions on emerging trends, Web 2.0, and learning strategy.

The dominKnow team will also be in the trade show in booth 611.

The exhibit floor is a good place for us to meet people interested in learning solutions, find out what others are doing, as well as chat to some of our current partners. We hope to see you there or in one of the sessions.

Catherine Orfald, Senior Instructional Designer

So much of the world of e-learning is aimed at internal organizational learning.

And if you look at the major conferences and trade shows, you might get the impression that it's just the big organizations that take best advantage of e-learning.

So it's refreshing and exciting to observe one of our clients, WhatsItWorthtoYou.com (wiw2u.com), rolling out a suite of almost three dozen courses for the world of antiques and collectibles, a learning opportunity that is a real community-focused project.

wiw2u.com's core focus is offering online appraisals, a sort of online antiques road show that takes advantage of a network of more than dozens of knowledgeable experts in almost every conceivable area of antique and collectible specialization.

That expert network forms the heart of the new set of courses, giving collectors a unique new opportunity to expand their knowledge of their particular collecting passion by learning from acknowledged experts. wiw2u.com has used the dominKnow LCMS to both create and deploy its courses.

The dominKnow LCMS's simple-to-use Authoring Tool enabled the wiw2u.com team to carry out all of its design and development goals in building the courses themselves, and the dominKnow API allowed wiw2u.com to tie the dominKnow LCMS into its existing website utilities, which already provided a structure for e-commerce as well as tracking site users, etc. When taking one of the new courses, wiw2u.com members never have to leave the website - the incorporation of the dominKnow LCMS into the site's existing structures is seamless.

All of this has been carried out by a small team that is passionate about the world of collecting, and is now reaching out to share that passion with others around the world. It's an exciting use of the power of e-learning.

A week and a half ago the iPod touch was officially released in Canada, and this week we're rolling out the beta version of our touch and iPhone-optimized mobile portal for the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS).

The portal has been designed using the iPhone User Interface (iUI), a framework and sample code released by Joe Hewitt, a software engineer and major contributor to the iPhone development community.

Taking advantage of our iPod touch-optimized portal puts the dominKnow Learning Center in the palm of a learner's hand.

Learners can log in and access full courses, as well as Learning Objects as single-topic information and any documents or Web links added as resources to a course. Learners can also access their internal e-mail inbox, progress reports and more.

We knew as soon as we had the iPod touch in our hands that this device could open up tremendous new access to learning on the go - all because of Apple's focus on the user experience. There's been a fair bit of talk about these features for a while now, since the iPhone hit the U.S. last spring. Chief among these is the ability to zoom in and out when viewing a web page. This solves so many display issues typically associated with mobile web viewing.

Our office has been buzzing with excitement over this for the past two weeks, starting with our CTO, Luke Hickey, who kicked off the portal project as soon as he had his iPod touch in hand.

Since then, team members have been walking around the office, showing each other the latest additions and tweaks to the portal. I can't count the number of hallway huddles I've been in, as people gather around to see the portal in action - it creates that kind of interest.

I've had my iPod touch for a week and a half, and so far I've spent far more time using Safari than I have listening to music - the Web user experience is that good. And it's easy to see so many ways it can get even better moving forward.

The iPod touch really points to a whole new generation of devices that could put this technology to great effect. It seems inevitable, for instance, that one next step will be a full laptop device with touch control, and in fact tech blog sites like engadget have been buzzing about just such a device since last year. (I already find the iTouch so much quicker for Internet searches at home and when traveling, since the power-up process is so much faster than my laptop.)

For many people the iPhone is already that device, and Apple's announcement that it will release a Software Developer Kit (SDK) in February should make things really start to cook.

Our new API is an exciting development for the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS).

By giving clients better tools to access the LCMS and the learning content it contains, we really feel we're taking the idea of re-usable learning content another step forward.

I'm writing this from the Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning Conference, where Stephen Downes opened with this morning's keynote address - a presentation on the development of E-learning 2.0 that included the audience's live blogging comments on one side of the stage while Downes' presentation ran on the other side. It was an interesting experiment, one that hopefully inspired the creativity of those sitting in the crowd.

Our new API is something that we hope will lead to some interesting and inspiring experiences as well. We can already predict some applications for it, such as simplifying the process for hooking the dominKnow LCMS up to an e-commerce site, for instance, or for allowing Learning Objects to be used in context-sensitive help within other applications.

What I think will be most interesting, though, is what others may try to do.

The new API opens up a world of learning possibilities and can help remove barriers to learning. We have no doubt that there are challenges out there, waiting to be solved and the API is an important way for us to empower our users to solve those challenges.

It's shaping up to be a busy fall for the dominKnow team, including several road trips for us in addition to development work on the dominKnow Learning Content Management System (LCMS) and our services team's custom courseware work.

Two events we're looking forward to in September are the Oil Sands Trade Show and Conference in Edmonton, Alberta on Sept. 19-20 and the Innovations in Learning Conference in Santa Clara, California on Sept. 24-27.

The Oil Sands Trade Show and Conference will give us a chance to once again meet with folks in the oil and gas industry in Alberta.

This industry is struggling with many growth pains, including a shortage of trained and qualified workers, and we feel that e-learning is a very powerful tool to help address many aspects of this issue. We'll be at booth 573 at the Northlands AgriCom.

The Innovations in Learning Conference, set for the following week, is an event that has the instructional designers among us quite excited. We're attending as part of a contingent of Canadian e-learning companies under the auspices of the Canadian eLearning Enterprise Alliance (CeLEA). We'll be providing a short presentation on the dominKnow LCMS during the Canadian E-Learning Showcase scheduled for the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 25.

We're looking forward to the "non-trade show" approach of the event's Conference Café, and, we must admit, there is also some interest in the wine-tasting on the Santa Cruz Pier.

Look us up if you're planning on attending the conference or even just the wine tasting!

The Alberta Oil Sands represent the second highest proven petroleum reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia. That's a lot of oil, and it underlines the fact that the biggest obstacle currently facing the oil industry isn't oil in the ground - it's a shortage of qualified people.

Despite the "roughneck" image many people have of the oil industry, the sector relies very heavily on highly-skilled and highly-trained workers. The fact these workers often get their hands dirty - literally - only makes their skill set unique from, say, computer programming or business administration.

The labor shortage has a number of causes. It isn't unique to the oil sands alone, and it's not new, either. It's common to the oil industry as a whole, and it has been for a while.

In 2001, for instance, the Petroleum Technology Transfer Council (PTTC) - a U.S.-based oil industry organization - was already lamenting the "dwindling supply of petroleum engineers, geologists and geophysicists". The organization further noted "the number of projects a given producing company engineer is responsible for has increased by more than 50% since 1990, and by 300% since 1970." Fewer people available to do more tasks is a real "rock and a hard place" issue that the entire oil sector faces.

The same PTTC newsletter states there are two ways for successful oil companies to address this issue:

• Make it easier for fewer people to accomplish more through better handling of information


• Improve the way professional knowledge is managed, expanded and conserved.

And PTTC identified technology-based solutions including e-learning as keys to these two goals.

E-learning offers many advantages to the oil sector.

E-learning uses the Internet to bridge distance and time. With e-learning, a worker in a camp outside Fort McMurray can be learning new and better ways to do her job despite being an hour's drive from the city or even a continent away from the head office of the company she works for.

E-learning is flexible and easily allows the right information to be put in the hands - better still, the mind - of the worker who needs it, when they need it. E-learning isn't limited to formal courses. It can be made available to answer questions on specific topics, so the oil sands worker can review the steps she needs to take to draw a sample, for instance, right before she has to carry out the task - rather than trying to remember it from a course she took a month before.

E-learning also speeds up training, compressing the time required to gain new knowledge by comparison with instructor led training. E-learning does this by allowing learning to be more focused on an individual's needs and by being available to the learner without a rigid schedule.

We've seen these solutions work first-hand in our own experiences developing and deploying e-learning for oil sands projects. Join us at the GO Expo in Calgary June 12 to 14 or just contact us through the form on this website -we'd be happy to share our experiences with you.