eLearning (etc) with Adobe

In the dim and distant past, when Adobe first announced Acrobat and I was a snidy journalist, it gave me huge pleasure to rib the company about the inflationary nature of its software. It would take simple text and inflate it to six or more times the size and say "now it can be read on multiple devices." My view then was that plain text could be viewed on multiple devices anyway.

But, of course, I was a words man and an ex-programmer whose first computers had the equivalent of just 2.4k of memory. We ran things like accounts, payroll and stock control on those things. I was a) not interested in presentation and b) paranoid about wasting computer resources. The idea that the Gettysburg address would require 6.4 times the storage in .pdf compared with .txt appalled me.

Of course, life moves on. Computer equipment has become cheaper and storage more plentiful and Adobe has spent its life delivering what real people want, rather than pandering to minorities like me. And, for what it's worth, I've been a consumer and creator of Acrobat and Flash materials for some years. I know my screencasts and invoices (for example) can be understood by anyone who has a Flash player or Acrobat reader, respectively.

This week, the company previewed some upcoming products and services, in particular Connect Pro 7  and Presenter 7 which are imminent. Adobe also mentioned a consumer-level conferencing system due in June and extended IM interoperability for Connect Pro later in the year. Connect Pro is a suite of web conferencing and eLearning facilities while Presenter is an authoring tool which adds things like quiz compilation, audio and video editing to PowerPoint 2007 and can publish the results to Connect Pro.

The end result is a powerful eLearning environment which runs from authoring, through conferencing, break-out group management, collaboration, quizzing and assessments. Live sessions can be recorded and edited and published for self-paced learning later. There's much more - security, APIs, integration with existing directories and so on. But best to visit the Adobe site for more details if you're interested.

Because Flash and Acrobat are available on multiple operating systems and run in different browsers, it means that just about anyone can participate in these conferences and learning experiences.

It turns out that the concepts that I scoffed at all those years ago, were actually smart in the extreme.