Macromedia Acquires Presedia, Inc.
“…With the acquisition of Presedia, Inc., Macromedia extends its leadership in the online presentation, training, and e-learning market. …blah, blah…enables non-technical professionals to use existing office productivity tools like Microsoft PowerPoint, annotate their presentations with audio, and combine these two elements into a streaming Macromedia Flash application delivered via a hosted or licensed solution…”
By way of evhead. Interesting – nothing stunning in here, PlaceWare, Centra and Interwise spring immediatly to mind as those that have been doing this for a while. However, this delivers into flash, adds rudimentary questioning and so does have a lot of potential as a low bandwidth, very simple info distribution tool. It’s wierd, as a designer of e-learning I suppose I should feel threatened by these sorts of tools, but I think they’re great – let experts quickly present ideas in a flash (groan) way. The simpler this stuff becomes the better.
And of course, e-learning design gets to move up a notch – designing communities, coaching the experts, designing deep, reflective content – i.e. the *really* interesting stuff. My biggest concern is the way that PowerPoint stifles creativity.