"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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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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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.

E-learning systems such as the Learning Management System (LMS) and Learning Content Management System (LCMS) face an upheaval, says Elliot Masie of the MASIE Center.

The e-learning futurist has his eyes on the e-learning prize, and says the target is not just moving but changing altogether.

"In a nutshell, we are moving from traditional branched e-Learning to a much wider set of informal learning, media-based objects, performance support objects, search based objects," he says in a "Briefing on LMS Changes", available on the website promoting the LMS 2007 Learning Systems User Group conference scheduled for Las Vegas April 12 and 13.

The reason? Changes in both the ways e-learning is being created and who is doing the creating, Masie says.

Here's what he says about the ways: "We are evolving from using just formal types of training to ever-increased production and distribution of informal content."

Here's what he says about the who: "Increasingly, Content is now coming not from a single syndicator of content, but rather from multiple sources. It is coming from internal and external sources and increasingly, Content is coming from the crowd. We are creating content at multiple points in the organization and we are giving the ability of subject matter experts and users, even sometimes customers and people in our supply chain, the opportunity to create Content as well."

And the challenge, he says, is helping learners find what they need: "We need to figure out a way in which our content becomes discoverable. Our learners are wanting to be able to get at Content in multiple formats...and our instructional designers are wanting to be able to get at the Content that's being created in other parts of our enterprise."

So what's an LCMS to do? Well, the answer really is to keep on doing what you've always done, only more of it.

That big capital C and big capital M in the acronym LCMS is what I'm talking about: Content Management.

The dominKnow LCMS has always been more than just a course creation tool.

It has always been a searchable, indexed content management tool that gives learners and developers alike the ability to find the learning content they need, whether that content is a full-fledged course with learning objectives and testing or a smaller piece of knowledge focused on an individual topic.

And it has always taken advantage of whatever content format works best for the individual creator of the content, whether it's a Microsoft Word or PowerPoint file or a PDF file or HTML pages or Adobe Flash movies (which includes content created by any tool able to export a .swf file.) And, with the 5.1 version, that now includes audio files such as podcasts.

This means: 1. Anyone can make the e-learning content they need to make 2. Anyone can find the e-learning content they need to find.

And it means that an LCMS is a good choice to help any organization deal with the changing natures of learning.

Sometimes, even good news travels slowly!

We've just noticed that PENS has offered congratulations to dominKnow Learning Systems for adding the new standard to the list of industry compliances and standards supported by our Learning Content Management System, the dominKnow LCMS.

Those congratulations were extended last December when we released version 5.1 of the dominKnow LCMS, which included PENS compliance.

PENS particularly applauded what it describes as dominKnow's "impressive time to market", noting that we announced support for the standard only 90 days after members of the dominKnow development team had attended the inaugural PENS Plugfest. The Plugfest got under way on Sept. 19, 2006, in Vancouver B.C., and we rolled out our PENS compliance on Dec. 19.

The Plugfest was attended by members of the dominKnow LCMS development team, who were also attending the simultaneously-held AICC meetings. Adding PENS to the list of e-learning industry standards we already conformed to (which include AICC and SCORM) was a pretty easy decision for us.

In fact, when I asked why we made the move to add PENS support, our CTO Luke Hickey said, "because it's cool."

In addition to the coolness factor, PENS helps us help our users get their online learning content into the hands of learners more easily, by simplifying the way e-learning courses move from a content and authoring system like our LCMS to a Learning Management System (LMS). In fact, the PENS specification describes this as "single click publishing" - and it doesn't get much easier than that.

Bersin and Associates rolled out their predictions for 2007 last week, announcing that this will be the year that "E-learning 3.0 arrives."

The company is predicting that organizations will make greater and better use of self-published training resources.

And dominKnow Learning Systems is ready to help make that happen. Version 5.1 of the dominKnow LCMS includes support for managing and deploying podcasts as part of an organizational learning strategy. We see this as opening a lot of doors for organizations and their employees or team members. It gives learners another channel for learning, particularly auditory learners. It frees up the learning process, allowing learning to take place without requiring an online connection. With the RSS feed capability of the podcast feature, learners can have content forwarded to them without logging even into the LCMS.

It also gives organizations an opportunity to encourage subject matter experts and even learners to help create learning content. It's fairly easy to create an audio file - almost anyone can do it on their computer. So now it's easy for learners to share success stories or tips, for example. In this way, everyone in the organization benefits from each learner's knowledge and experience.

We also hope it will open new creative options for designing learning. Last month, the E-Learning Queen offered some observations on ways the best-written television shows generate interest and hold a viewer's attention - and how these could be used in educational podcasts. More creativity will flow, no doubt!