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Interestingly, what you describe about your activities does not relate to what
we do in our company at all, but still we're in the same business! "E-learning"
is such a vast area. Most of what I heard mentioned in the halls in Barcelona
was training for children (i.e. language training, maths...). We do training
for adults in the service sector. Among adults you have those with (a lot of)
formal education and those without, to put it sqarely, and these require very
different training. We focus strongly on engaging content that stimulates
reflection. Engaging content just for the sake of it is out - we call it 'the
Las Vegas effect' when ther's nothing underneath. Video is often a key
ingredient. "Content is king" for sure, but what do they really mean, at Adobe?
With Adobe products you can certainly make a lot of BEAUTIFUL content, but how
do you give it some meaning, i.e. how do you put actual content into that
"content"? Actually I think this is a crisis somehow among 'creatives' these
days... It's not just to make a picture, it must (very often) connect to
something, and in a professional organisation that is a bit of a challenge.
Adobe haven't helped much. I am pretty sure that the main reason why Premiere
never has got a hold among corporate video editors is its traditional lack of
good media handling; i.e. logging, sorting, versioning. Although things have
improved, AVID is still much better. This is what Adobe is trying to rectify
with Bridge and Version Cue, I believe. This is a different focus than content
developers usually have: "what is it good FOR", instead of the traditional
challange of "how good can I make it". the former approach is a more humanist
and story telling approach, while the latter is a more technical one. As Adobe
products gets easier and easier(???), it will be possible to shift focus to the
usefulness of what you make. I'm not sure Adobe is concious about this. There
is still no good general tool for pipeline work that could be used in
e-learning, that handles user request in one end, leargning goals and solutions
in the middle, and user tracking and reporting at the end. Thankfully, or
perhaps our buisness wouldn't be around ;-)
This post was not very Director specific. Story is that our grand application
today could have been written in Director (90% of it), but since I am the only
developer, and Director unfortunately is kind of 'closed world', it was not a
realistic option. Damn good XML support would have helped though.
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