On 03/27/2012 09:11 PM, Judy Perry wrote:
Certainly, it's easy enough to blame poor online learning experiences
on lazy or inept instructional designers who all too often are taught
to use truly crappy tools, but it doesn't excuse the crappy tools
themselves.
And why do teachers and instructional designers use crappy tools?
Because it's all they know; it's all their colleagues know, it's the
only thing they see at educational conferences that is even remotely
comprehensible, which means that most of them have never heard of LC
and never will. And, even if they did, imagine that poor hapless soul
whose degree, after all, is in teaching or instructional design and
not CS, on this 10+ year bumpy road EE ticket for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride
of LC in education! "We're a'going this away... WAIT A MINUTE!! NO
WE'RE NOT!!"
Rev can't do anything about teachers who are not allowed to download
and install software (I couldn't even get a state university satellite
campus to install GIMP for heaven's sake!) but there other things it
could do to make LC a better product for designing online or
computer-based instruction.
*It could show itself at actual teaching/educational conferences.
HyperStudio knows that and does it and teachers have heard of it.
*It could improve the out-of-box experience for new users (haven't we
been asking that for nearly a decade?).
*It could structure its instructional content into graded paths that
are intuitive to use for differing types of users instead of just
dumping them in the middle of a bazillions lessons on how to do things
using keywords that new users aren't likely to know.
*It could pick a path and just gradually STICK WITH IT. It's this
constant serving about on the educational development road that make
the product look so very iffy... (MEDIA! Players! Web Plugin!
HTML5? yeah baby! until we drop it!)
And, yupp, iPads are the shiny new toys... that will suck budgetary
funds out of nurses and teacher's aids and lunches for nothing
(remember when having laptops in the classroom was the new shiny toy
that accomplished what exactly??? and before that having a desktop
computer in the classroom?).
Oh, and I'm not kidding about the lunches thing. On cold or rainy
days I have the kids eat a school lunch, only for them to tell me that
they ate a banana, a cookie and a piece of fake cheese because the
school ran out of the hot meals they were supposed to be serving.
Yes, RAN OUT.
Ach, Judy; Thee and Me have been saying all the above to RunRev for a
longish time; and they have never managed to present a consistent
educational front . . .
. . . what they probably need (but would be loath to admit) is an
educationalist to run their educational side (well, if they had one), run
around schools demoing the thing, co-opting teachers, and so on.
This June I should like to give some of my kids a "quick-n-dirty" 3 day
course with RR/Livecode. I honestly cannot see much point as there
is no RevMedia and/or cut-down free version for those kids to take away
at the end of things.
Judy
On Tue, 27 Mar 2012, Bob Earp wrote:
I sense the frustration Judy, but wonder if it was related somewhat
to your children's birthday ;-)
Having just had a granddaughter turn 11 and a grandson 9, I too
wondered what we had really achieved in online learning since I
started with Plato (a DOS system running on a custom Pee Cee) back in
the stone age. Compared to the evolution of technology, I suspect
not much.
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