Thoughts from eLearning Conference
April 25th, 2007
I enjoyed my time at the conference two weeks ago in Boston. I managed to catch a Red Sox game while there, meet up with a few Director folks, and drink a bit of beer.
Most of the sessions I went to were associated with gaming in education. The phrase of the day in eLearning is Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS). They are pretty much what they sound like. Immersive. Learning. Simulation.
A common form of immersion is taking place in massively multiplayer online games. Director is a tool that can be used to create these. Sites created with Director such as Habbo Hotel and MaidMarian were shown. Phosphor was also shown as an example of an amazing 1st person shooter for the web. Many people pointed out that Director really is the best tool for developing 3d web-based worlds.
During several sessions the speakers pointed out that the next version of Director will be coming out later this year. I was hoping the Adobe booth would have CS3 kicking around, but alas, even they didn’t get a copy to play with. While talking about Director I noticed a few people were also asking about an update to Authorware.
It was an interesting experience for me, since I’d never really thought much about the resources involved with the corporate side of eLearning (since I’ve always been on the K to college world). A lot of companies, and a lot of money. A bit shocking compared to the K-12 side of things.
The highlight of the conference though was probably due to Media 1. Their raffle prize was flying toy helicopter. Needless to say, the cute little helicopter now zips through the office near the end of the day. No critical data has been lost 🙂
Entry Filed under: Daily thoughts,Director PR
4 Comments Add your own
1. Sean Moore | April 25th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Nice post.
Did you hear much about SCORM, Flash and/or Apollo?
How about LMS vendors? See anything cool there?
Thanks,
2. MultimediaGuy | April 25th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Flash was everywhere. So many products now use it, particularly for video. I went to sessions about Flash video, and Captivate. Both were packed.
I didn’t hear much about Apollo, but may not have poked in to the right sessions. Typical conference with lots of competing sessions.
SCORM compliance was definitely associated with every vendor at the show, and mentioned in a few of the talks I went to.
Lots of different LMS systems, but didn’t spend a lot of time looking at them. The one that caught my eye was a LMS for video content that allowed for tagging of the videos so that users could quickly jump to portions of the video lessons, and with the SCORM you could pull that chunk of video in when needed. I’ll see if I can find the name of that company one of these days.
My talk was Thursday afternoon, and the vendors packed up at the same time. Since I was still working on the talk a bit I didn’t get chance to walk around as much as I would have liked. Maybe next year 🙂
3. serious game designer | April 26th, 2007 at 5:31 am
I think that Director is (one of) the best tool for making so called serious games. Unfortunately most people are so Flash biased for webbased games. I need to explain and show the benefits of Shockwave over and over again.
4. Director @ Night » &hellip | July 8th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
[…] saw this presentation in person earlier this spring and really enjoyed […]
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