LearningPoint CourseViewer(tm)…

The excellent technical Sharepoint/Silverlight house that is Point8020 has released a free version of it’s new course delivery vehicle as CourseViewer(tm). You can download it with the how-to from their site here (in exchange for some minor registration details). The CourseViewer(tm) can be inserted into a website or into a Sharepoint 2010 Silverlight webpart.

CAVEAT – this is not a ‘system’, it’s a content viewer – so on one hand, don’t expect song, dance, bells, whistles and the tea made to boot – but on the other hand, it’s how you use it that will let you get some good use out of it.

The snip below shows the CourseViewer(tm) – it’s some Silverlight code which consumes an XML file which describes your course. The top panel displays a list of modules (defined in the XML) within your course – these module graphics slide right/left as you scroll through them and the module content list (lower left) refreshes with thumbnails of the content items. You can switch from a thumbnail view to a list view of the content. Click on a content item and it will either launch in the panel on the lower right (if it’s a WMV) or in a separate app window (depending on the content type). You can stick in a simple self-test at module level. So far, so Simples and all defined in XML.

For me the trick comes with thoughtful use of course collateral. For instance you can produce a voiced-over Powerpoint and generate a WMV – make it high resolution and you can expand the player to full screen for a good experience – all within the viewer. Put it on your corporate portal with a list of internal or external resources – web pages, PDFs, SWFs – use the modules to layer your content within the restrictions of the viewer – using modules for summarisation, testing and recap and you’ve got yourself a very useful and reasonably attractive micro-learning tool.

You could see this and think that it’s not that greatly useful but if you put your mind to it, you can work-up something interesting, a bit different and with a taste of (Sharepoint) things to come.

Not Drowning but Waving…

With the recent release of the 2010 Information Worker VM the grand old Virtual PC needs to be superseded (for me) by the colossus of virtualisation that is Hyper-V. I run a (fairly quick) laptop with the elegant Windows 7 and the ever-boisterous Office 2010 beta (including Project and Visio). What would be my route ahead? Naturally it would be Windows Server 2008 R2 X64 [Rim-shot sound and supportive polite applause from other Villagers].

After an abortive attempt to setup a ‘boot from VHD’ configuration (my fail – it clearly works fine for others) I decided that introducing a well-behaved neighbour of an operating system to share some silicon in an old fashioned dual-boot setup  would fall into the ‘suits you sir’ category. After a brief Google, this seemed to be 1. Possible 2. Do-able 3. and most importantly, do-able by me. But How? Could it be as simple as run Setup.exe and DON’T USE C:/WINDOWS?

Fortunately, my laptop has a small partition which I can hijack for the purpose (but I can’t tell you what it is ‘cause you’ll laugh). The question was how much space would be required – baby lemur or sasquatch footprint – Core is not really an option for me despite the amount of command-let and scripting support on the web – nowadays I need an interface which supports me like a virtual Zimmer-frame.

A blog entry (which I can’t find again) mentioned a 6Gb installation so I decided to crash ahead confident of success!!

The Outcome??

1.2008 R2 Standard edition has nestled snugly into a 6.5Gb corner of my available extra partition. 2. I now have an (automatically generated) dual boot menu offering me a choice of 2 of Microsoft’s best. 3. Said instance of Win 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role occupies only around 630Mb of RAM and 4. All do-able by me so far.

Simples!

The next step is to assemble the VM’s from the down-loaded RAR’s and check that they play nice in my modest sandbox.