What is it that is needed? ...tutorials

[Trevor DeVore]

On May 21, 2005, at 7:20 PM, Marielle Lange wrote:

>> Eventually we would like to move our Blue Mango Learning System  
>> into educational institutions (we actually have history software  
>> that is used in some courses at BYU).  Our approach is different  
>> from what people are used to (Macromedia tools mostly) and when  
>> things aren't the norm there is always hesitation to adopt.
>
> Trevor, seriously, I found the points you made highly valuable.  
> That's how things should be...
>
> But this means that you sell your product only once. Is it a good  
> business strategy? For instance, in my university, they paid a  
> designer to produce a CD-rom with educational content 7-8 years  
> ago. 3-4 years ago, they decided to migrate the material on the now  
> popular web, but they couldn't the content was locked, impossible  
> to access to (other than screen captures), they had to pay somebody  
> else to do the full work again.

Well we will be licensing the authoring software for the time being.   
The viewer is available for free.  We store all media outside of the  
application inside of folders so content is never locked up.  We also  
allow for export of the text content to other formats as needed so  
nobody is ever locked into our system.  We like to play nicely with  
others.

> More seriously, I really do not understand the political games  
> currently at play in the domain of research and education...  
> technologies are now available that allow them to achieve  
> wonders... and they just seem to *AVOID* them and rather stick to  
> unproductive and inefficient approaches, sticking to "the norm" as  
> much as they can. There is such a huge discrepency between the  
> progress made over the last 10 years in the private (mobile phones,  
> mp3 players, pdas, computers, computer books, business websites,  
> etc) and state-funded (research, education) domains. There <http:// 
> www.jiscmail.ac.uk/> you will find hundreds of mailing lists on e- 
> learning initiatives, where so many persons speak about what  
> *could* be done and how useful it would be if somebody one day did  
> it... but most of the persons who discuss do not know how to  
> program themselves... *NOT MUCH* gets done.

Yeah, lots of things get discussed but not much gets done.  We could  
have a long discussion about why innovation is difficult in large  
organizations or places with an established way of doing things.   
Creating new ways of doing things often comes from smaller teams that  
aren't hindered by the agenda of somebody above them.  You almost  
have to sneak in while nobody is looking ;-)


-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com