We did the fan walk to go to the first game. It’s basically a 30 – 45 minute walk from downtown to the Green Point stadium. Along the way there’s music, food, and tons of little stalls. I’m still planning to do it one more time so I can get a pimped out vuvuzela. It seems the best ones are sold there. I was shocked at the police presence in Cape Town. It’s not just a few extra police – there are thousands of them. They walk in groups ranging from 3 to 10. You see them on horses, on bikes, on foot, in cars, etc. Some walk around, some are stationed, and some are handling traffic. It’s actually quite amazing to see such a heavy police presence.

I went to watch the Portugal vs. North Korea match earlier this week. We had regular tickets in the stands. We ended up sitting amongst a group of Portuguese fans.  Everyone wants to see goals when they watch a match. In this match, Portugal destroyed North Korea with a devastating 7-0 score in their favor. Everyone jumps to their feet when a goal is scored. There were so many scored in this game that it felt like doing a squats workout.

The game was well attended – approximately 63000 people in attendance. I was worried about the vuvuzelas and the potential noise. Everyone was talking about how horrible they are and how loud they are. I honestly think this is just bias. I had ear plugs but I really didn’t need them. As long as someone doesn’t blow one near your ear – the sound is fine. The ambience in the matches is pretty cool. The people with vuvuzelas have sort of sound offs. One group on the other side start a beat with theirs and the vuvuzelas on the other side start blowing with a counter beat. That goes on and off all through the matches. As a team begins to gain momentum – they start blowing to the beat for that team.

And then there are the waves. I’ve seen waves in a stadium – but somehow these seemed to have a life of their own. For starters – it’s awesome to see over 60000 people join in a wave. As the wave approaches, you start beating your feet on the ground to create a thunder sound. The feeling is amazing – it vibrates through your whole body. Once it’s upon you – you jump up wave, blow your vuvuzela if you want, then go back down. The waves  circled the stadium over and over and over.

So I have only a few gripes about the experience. First is the lack of food in the stadiums. McDonalds is the official food for the stadium so there are a few lonely McDonald’s stands. The only other food available is ice cream. Now who wants ice cream at a soccer match in the winter? Budweiser is the official beer – but no one drinks Bud in South Africa. So there isn’t a lot of drinking going on. Half time is literally 15 minutes long, so the bathroom lines are insane at half time. In fact, all of the lines are insane at half time. They did have some folk walking through the stands selling beers – but they really needed a lot more.

When the match was over, we got up and headed out. I was expecting long lines and a miserable process getting out of the stadium – but it was actually painless. We basically had a nice leisurely walk out of the stadium. People were still blowing their vuvuzelas, recounting the awesome 7 goals we saw, and basically behaving like crazed fans. We did the fan walk back to the city and decided to go bar hopping for a while.  The bar hopping is actually pretty nice. Cape Town is renowned for Long street and its bar life. Add thousands of tourists to it – and it’s a bar hopper’s dream. Everywhere we went – people were clad in their national colors and flags. Since no one was drinking at the stadium – people went straight from the stadium to the bars and started loading up. There was a nice celebratory mood across all of the bars and lounges. It was nice to see all of the excitement, national pride, and patriotism, without any of the angry violent behavior that can ensue. All in all it was good times.

We were situated in our seats when 6 senior-citizen European men came onto the plane. They were clearly tipsy and jovial (to say the least). They were giggling, laughing obnoxiously and staggering as they made their way to their seats. Once they figured out where they were sitting – they started telling jokes, laughing out loud and telling stories so loud – we could all hear it. Several other passengers muttered, “11 more hours….. this is going to be horrible”. I should start by saying – I’ve never quite understood hooligan culture. I have sometimes contemplated what motivates the passionate European fans that wreak havoc with their sports-inspired revelry. These men were clearly itching to get up to some mischief – and it hit me – these probably aren’t hooligans – but they are either retired hooligans or perhaps the parents of some hooligans. The remainder of the flight was a flurry of requests for cocktails, wine, and beers.  The flight attendants came back countless times asking them to be quiet. Not only were they chanting and singing, but they kept congregating together. At any given time 2 – 3 of them were standing in the aisles with a glass of wine or beer, laughing out loud about something.

At some point, one of the men actually pulled out a light-weight European version of a Vuvuzela and started blowing it on the flight. I could only think that if this flight was bound into the US – an air marshal would have detained them and probably diverted our flight out of the US!  At one point, after about 20 minutes of constant horn blowing, the flight attendant walked by calmly and snatched the horn. She was met with cheers and clapping once she finally did it.

Then there was the singing. I heard a few national anthems and then lots of “Oooooolaaaaaaay-Olay-o-Laaaaaaaaaaay! Oooo-Laaaaay-Oooooo-Laaaaaay!” I couldn’t help but think that – these men were old enough to be someone’s parent. Imagine if your parents were this passionate about their teams, I can only imagine what their children were like. I felt sorry for anyone who was trying to sleep on the flight because there was no chance with all of the singing. Ultimately the flight ended without incident, but it made me realize how serious this soccer business is.

MS Office Live Workpaces - free online collaboration

Peter and I take a very methodical approach to our common goals. I was toying with the idea of finding a free SharePoint service out there – when I ran into a free Microsoft service called Microsoft Office Live Workspaces. It was free and all I needed was a windows live account and I could have a space. Well I should add one caveat – you also need to have Internet Explorer to use it! Oh and there was the requirement of having the Silverlight plug-in installed. OK – so after I got through all of the hooplah– I’m still thinking that this is pretty cool.

Here are some useful specs (the good stuff ):

• Task lists
• Shared calendars
• MS Office ( Word, PowerPoint, and Excel)
• MS Office integration
• Contact lists
• Multiple workspaces
• Permissions (only site level – not item level)
• Desktop sharing
• Folders
• Lists
• Notes
• Version control on documents
• Allows comments on documents / etc
• Allows sharing of documents
• 5 gb of storage space
• Light-weight email notifications
• Does allow for customization of lists

Here are some limitations

• No item level permissions
• Not a strong task management solution
• No workflows
• Requires internet explorer
• Works best when you own Microsoft office
• Requires several plugins
• Content Management is very light-weight

All in all – for a free solution – this is a good tool to use. I’ll definitely be using it for small personal projects. It’s a place to dump your files, share task lists, share calendars, etc. It’s god because it allows you to create unlimited numbers of workspaces and to apply permissions accordingly. The interface is also much cleaner with a Web 2.0’ish feel. Microsoft might be onto something with this freebie SharePoint-like wannabe.

If you want to try it out – http://workspace.officelive.com

Field Runner Frost Bite Level 100

The secret to this map is to use the ice towers heavily. You should use them between every 5 – 6 towers and upgrade them fully. Although rockets are great for helicopters, in this case, the lightning towers are your friends. I basically wrapped the center of the map in electric towers and ice towers. You can use the gun towers to build the longest possible route to the entrance. I’ve also had a lot of success with making sure that the only entrance to the goals was on the left. The screenshot below is my configuration and what level 100 looked like:

I did try to do some upgrades to see how far I could keep this going but I lost at level 135. The screenshot below is a screenshot of my configuration for the final levels. I should have taken a screenshot at 135, but here’s the one I did at 131. I still had the same configuration at 135. I did try to use the fire towers, but frankly speaking – I don’t think they are effective on this map.

Fieldrunners Frostbite Level 131

Flipburger

Flip Burger Boutique is a trendy burger joint off of Howell Mill in Atlanta. I love a good burger so the ideal of a gourmet burger was more than appealing. The restaurant is attractive on the inside. It has a sort of minimalist clean look to it. I went on a late Saturday afternoon, and it has a wide range of people – from families with kids to trendy twenty-somethings. They have a nice patio area – with trendy red plastic molded chairs. This was definitely a positive experience with an awesome meal.

Location

1587 Howell Mill Rd NW
Atlanta, GA 30318-7648
(404) 343-1609

Website: http://www.flipburgerboutique.com/

Menu: http://www.flipburgerboutique.com/flipmenu.pdf

Food

First let me be clear – these are gourmet burgers! They are not colossal burgers that are good because of their sheer size. They are not large, and for guys – you might even want to have two if you’re really hungry. They are extremely flavorful and very surprising. The presentation is attractive – and they just look like they should taste good.

I had the philly burger and Peter had the chorizo burger. This was new for me because I pretty much just like basic burgers – bacon, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, ketchup and mustard. Both of us were extremely happy with the burgers. They also have an amazing list of milkshakes but we didn’t order any of them – so I can’t report back on that. The fries are thin cut and light – but equally delicious. Having tried 2 of their burgers – I’ll definitely come back!

Ambiance

This is definitely for the trendy younger crowd. I saw people with their children here, but I’m not sure I’d want to bring a kid there. They do serve cocktails – and they are yummy! This is definitely good for a not too romantic date.

Random Thoughts

If you haven’t tried flip burger you definitely should! Ladies – the burgers are a decent size – so you can easily finish one of these. Guys – you might want to snack before you come – since a single serving isn’t too big. This is definitely one of my favorite burger experiences.

It’s actually SCORM compliant

Many claim to be SCORM compliant – but we’ve tested it and this one definitely is!

It works well within the SharePoint constructs

I do a lot of SharePoint based solutions for business collaboration. Therefore it only makes sense that if we were going to do e-learning, we would want to do something that fits within the SharePoint construct. This one works great in that respect and can quick enhance your portal. This is like taking a good LMS and adding the full power of MOSS to it!

You can easily insert surveys into the learning path

I really liked the fact that we could ask a student if they liked the course right at the end of the learning path!

It works on MOSS – don’t try to install it on WSS!

It works great on MOSS. We made the mistake of testing it on WSS and it literally tore WSS apart!

It’s got tons of bookmarking

There are actually 2 levels of bookmarking. You can return to your position in a learning path or return to your position within your SCORM. Pretty cool!

You can easily add quizzes

We ultimately didn’t need them because our quizzes are part of our SCORM, but I like the fact that we can roll these out.

Reports can be scheduled and emailed

I did like the fact that we could schedule recurring reports and they can automatically be emailed to someone. That takes away the burden of manually pulling the reports.

User Management Module allows for easy management of students

We did add this module and it really helped our LMS administrator.

You can apply your own theme to each course

We didn’t do this – but I can definitely see the usefulness of being able to have a different look and feel for each course.

Prerequisites

This was a core requirement for us. We liked to be able to force a user to complete a lesson or activity before moving onwards.

Ultimately – if you deal with a SharePoint environment, you will like this product. It’s got a lot going on and I think with future versions will be a force to be reckoned with in the e-learning game!

The gradebook – not all it’s cracked up to be

I had two major issues with the gradebook. The major one was that when we added over 500 users, the gradebook came to a grinding halt. Whenever one of us accessed the gradebook – it simply failed to respond. When we had only 20 users it worked fine. It seemed to be a huge resource hog and would shoot our server memory up to 2GB and cause huge processor spikes. When this would happen, sometimes a page would load, sometimes not. Often the entire site stopped working for all of us because one person accessed the gradebook. Therefore we had to get rid of it because it had huge performance implications.

The second issue was more of a subjective issue – but it doesn’t really seem that useful for the end user. It uses a horizontal way to display the information which makes it not that easy on the eye. There’s also no way to really customize how it looks for students. Ultimately we abandoned it and added a way for users to see their attempts and scores on the course landing pages.

You can’t add HTML in a lot of places

It takes a few clicks for a user to get to their lessons. For example:

1. Click to get to your course
2. Click to enter your learning path
3. Click to confirm you want to start the learning path
4. Click to start the lesson

Now this is not an unreasonable number of steps to get to a lesson. However, to an end user who may not be aware of what a learning path vs lesson is – this may seem a bit confusing. We were able to use SharePoint designer as well as some of the menus to add some text explaining this, but it would be nice to have menu options to fill information at each of these stages.

Double sets of buttons

SharePoint by default has double sets of buttons. This is so that if you have a long list, you don’t have to scroll to the top or bottom to find the buttons. However, in some cases the LMS has these double sets of buttons with only one line of text in between them. If we were able to add some HTML in between the buttons it would make it a bit more attractive, but for the end user, it looked awkward from time to time.

While within a course – the full list of courses does not display

When you are at the root of the LMS, you can see a list of all available courses on the quick launch. Unfortunately when you drill into a course (which is really a sub-site) the course item on the quick launch remains, yet it’s empty. This creates a menu option with no content. We couldn’t figure out how to turn this off. It would be nice if we were able to get it to fully populate.

Delineating between attempts of a learning path and attempts of a SCORM

This really got us confused. When a user is moving through the learning path, there are a series of screens identifying where there is a new or existing attempt. However, the default language doesn’t reflect that in the LMS.  We found ourselves starting attempt 2, and then starting attempt 4 and not understanding how the LMS was counting. Ultimately we discovered that it was attempt #2 of the learning path and attempt #4 of the SCORM. We added some cues to explain this to users as they worked through the learning path.

Unable to get to full SCORM data

When a user finishes a SCORM, they get a full summary of their activities. It’s the type of stuff that is most useful for evaluation of your training.  It tells them what they answered, what questions they did well on, what questions they had to answer more than once, how much time they spent etc. Unfortunately when you run reports on activity, you aren’t able to access the granular data. We also could not find the data and so therefore couldn’t pull it into a list or out of the database L

Reporting wishes –  why are they only cumulative

The reports are always cumulative. We wanted to provide a report over a specific period of time. We devised a way to pull regular reports and then calculate the difference between the current report and the previous one to determine activity – but that’s a round-about way of doing things.

I wish the reports had some advanced charting

We really would have liked to have some pie-charts, bar graphs, etc for the reporting. It produced a concise table with information, but when showing these things to the client – it’s always better to have some graphics that can be generated automatically. A reporting panel would be great.
Controlling where a user lands at the end of a learning path

At the end of a learning path or at the end of a lesson, a user always lands on the respective allitems.aspx page. The problem is that this page doesn’t really fit within a web-site and is more of a page that makes sense in SharePoint. As a result, we used SharePoint designer to customize these pages so that they looked like they were part of the navigation.

Control over the quick launch area that lists the elements of the learning path

It’s great that the LMS lists all of the elements of your learning path as well as your progress. It does this in the quick launch. However, the quick launch is always fairly short and cannot support long amounts of text. To address this the LMS allows scrolling, but it looks awkward. The result is a horizontal scroll bar in the middle of the quick launch that seems out of place. If nothing else – this text should wrap and perhaps be bulleted so that it can be clearly viewed.

The language files are cumbersome
You might not be too happy with the default language in the LMS. We wanted to change things like the words attempt and how it displayed attempts. It was initially grammatically wrong … it would say :

1. You are about to start 1 attempt
2. You are about to start 2 attempt
3. You are about to start 3 attempt

We were able to change this – but it’s literally like searching for a needle in a hay stack.  Furthermore, one we opened the language files, we realized that text was re-used in multiple places. So you might change congratulatory text yet realize it’s used to congratulate people for 3 different scenarios. Without a manual for the language files, it was quite tedious to customize it. This LMS could benefit from a control panel for managing these things or if nothing else… a manual for the language files!

Migrating user scores – ain’t so easy

We needed to migrate scores for users into the LMS. There was no way to do this with an import feature. We also couldn’t go in and “set” scores or award certificates for users. This presents a large problem when migrating a large number of users into this LMS.

Last Thoughts

We were able to overcome pretty much everything listed here. However, the fact that they needed to be overcome is what was frustrating. Ultimately, I do like this product. There are things that work great and other things that are strangely challenging. With some custom development and use of SharePoint designer, you can do quite a bit to make this your own.

We were able to create our own SCORM compliant flash e-learning lessons and get them to work within the LMS. All of the lessons scored properly – so it was comforting to know that we were able to move our lessons from one LMS straight into another LMS. Our requirements were fairly straight forward:

1. Develop a working LMS
2. Migrate our content into the new LMS
3. Migrate user scores into the LMS
4. Allow for multiple learning paths per course
5. Add surveys at the end of each course
6. Generate certificates for users
7. Support prerequisites within the learning paths
8. Allow users to bookmark their progress within their lessons
9. Allow users to track their progress through lessons
10. Allow users to retake lessons as they wish
11. Make sure the menus were not confusing

There were more – but that’s a good overview of what we set out to do. Because SharePoint out of the box is so plain-vanilla – we also designed a fully custom theme to make it look more like a web-site. What we ended up with was a heavily customized SharePoint site. We got the learning management system to work. We created our own navigation and as-you-go help cues to assist users with using the site. As for the requirements :

1. We did create a fully functional LMS
2. All of the lessons were migrated in
3. We were able to migrate the user scores (but that’s another story for another post!)
4. We were able to create all of our learning paths
5. We were able to integrate surveys into the learning paths (but there’s more to add on how that worked ultimately!)
6. Certificate generation worked fine!
7. We got all of the prerequisites working – so you had to pass certain lessons to move onwards.
8. We got bookmarking to work (but we didn’t realize there were 2 levels of bookmarking!)
9. We were able to show users their progress (but I’ll talk about the grade book later)
10. Users could take lessons in or outside of their learning path
11. We did quite a bit to work with the menus – but even the default SharePoint menus are frustrating at times.

I should add that to deploy this it took a SharePoint administrator, SharePoint specialist or two, a SharePoint developer, a flash / SharePoint developer, as well as a full e-learning team. Once deployed the product is easy to use – but do not make the mistake of thinking it’s easy to deploy this.