AICC Meetings January 2009 in Mumbai

It is time to start making your arrangements for the next AICC meeting to be held Mumbai, India hosted by Hurix Learning. To assure your ability to participate we urge you to begin making travel plans now to allow adequate time for visa and other requirements. Preliminary information is available immediately from the AICC Meeting Information page. Additional details will be posted as they become available in the next week or two.

Summary Information for Mumbai Meetings

Meeting Schedule: Tuesday January 20, 2009 - Friday January 23, 2009. Meeting sessions start at 8:00 am and run until 5:00 pm most days. Note that this set of meetings will begin on Tuesday in order to better accommodate international travel,

Meeting Logistics: All AICC Subcommittee Meetings will be held at the offices of Hurix Learning, Mumbai India. Transportation to the meeting will be provided from the meeting hotel to the meeting location. Dress is business casual.

Lodging: As of November 8, 2008, Hurix is currently negotiating hotel rates. The hotel information will follow in subsequent announcements.

Registration: Non-members of AICC will be charged $150 to attend the meeting. Representatives of member organizations in good standing (i.e., have paid their annual membership dues) will not be charged.

Business Visa Requirements and Health information: A Business Visa is needed for those who are doing business in India such as making sales or establishing contacts on behalf of a company outside of India. An application can be completed online. A sponsor letter from an organization in India is also needed.

Please see the preliminary meeting information for additional details on visa, sponsor letter and travel information. Please allow 4-6 weeks for via processing.

AGR-010 Certification: Plateau Systems

Plateau Systems, Ltd. received AICC certification to AGR-010 for for Plateau Learning Management System Version 5.8 on 04-Nov-2008. The Test Lab Report and the Certification Statement are now available online.

Meeting Minutes and Call for Presentations

Electronic versions of the presentations and the meeting minutes from the AICC September 2008 Louisville meetings are available online. See the AICC Louisville Meeting Minutes page for the minutes and a link to all of the available online presentations.

The next AICC meeting is scheduled for January 2009 in Mumbai. As an international organization, the AICC always encourages participation from across the globe.

For the January meeting, the AICC is particularly interested in ideas, topics and presentations from organizations in the Pan-Pacific and Indian Ocean areas.

Suggestions for discussion topics and presentation proposals should be sent to presentations@aicc.org for review.

Though membership is encouraged, presenters do not need to be AICC members. Typically, meeting attendance fees are waived for guest presenters. As always, representatives from AICC Voting Members and Observer Members may attend meetings free of charge. Non-members are always welcome to attend any general session of the AICC and can chose to pay a nominal meeting fee instead of annual membership.

The meeting logistics and schedule for January are being confirmed by the meeting host. Details will be posted here in approximately two weeks.

Podcasts, Information, and Celebration

Podcasts — Two additional podcasts are available in the AICC Podcasts series. Improved links to the podcasts are now included in the sidebar of the AICC News blog page. The latest podcasts feature Ed Cohen of Plateau, and current AICC Chairman, Neil Cramer, of Northwest Airlines.

Information
There were some great tidbits of information exchanged at the AICC Meeting in Louisville. Below are some of the items people contributed or found interesting.

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, 2008 – Excellent book on the “Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” that addresses social networks, social capital, and distributed coordination/organization of labor.

X-Plane – Excellent flight simulator available for Mac, Windows and Linux. Currently $39 USD it soon goes back up to $59 USD.

X-Plane for iPhone – As demonstrated by Kris Rockwell during the Mobile Technologies presentation. X-Plane flight simulator that runs on iPhone, pitch and roll controlled by tilting and accelerometers.

Xobni – Email organizer, search, analytics and productivity tool for individuals. Plugin for Microsoft Outlook that calculates average response times, threads conversations and more.

DeviceAnywhere – Test any mobile device on any mobile network with their hosted hardware and software solution. Great for mobile application development and deployment testing.

Acoustic Magic Voice Tracker – Array microphone that tracks / "tunes in" to the current speaker in a conference room. Recommended by a distance education technologist from University of Louisville.

Captionate – Captionate is a Windows application that embeds data into FLV (Flash Video) files. Excellent tool for captioning, closing captioning and using cue points with streaming media.

Celebration — Social networking is even better when celebrating. AICC participants shared ideas, memory and delicious cake during the 20th Anniversary Celebration. Happy Birthday AICC.

Special thanks to our wonderful hosts, UPS Airlines who handled all the meeting arrangements and provided a fantastic tour of the UPS Worldport facility. The AICC especially appreciated the arrangements made by Ray Butler of UPS for a special package:

Meeting minutes from Louisville will be posted shortly and announced here. Attendees will also receive a meeting roster of fellow participants. The January 2009 meeting is being planned for Mumbai, India. More information on that upcoming meeting will be posted in late October.

AICC Position Paper for SCORM 2.0

During today's meetings we discussed the AICC Position Paper on SCORM 2.0 (click the attachments tab or download link for full paper). Interested parties should visit the page and add their comments to the LETSI wiki before the October 15-17, 2008 LETSI SCORM 2.0 Workshop (sold out). A paper background and summary follows below.

As original contributors to SCORM and as representatives of a community of practice with a great volume of long-lived legacy content, the AICC has submitted this paper expressing our high level requirements for the existing model and for the evolution of SCORM going forward.

The AICC Position Paper addresses 7 major considerations for SCORM evolution:

1. Maintenance of a data model consistent with the requirements of all communities of practice, or a reliable methodology for profiling to suit the specific needs of any COP.
2. Creation of a web services based communication protocol.
3. Modification and simplification of the sequencing model.
4. Enhanced functionality for capturing assessment data.
5. Enhanced functionality for mobile computing.
6. Introduction of portfolio or portable records functionality.
7. Introduction of functionality for simulation interoperability.