Wednesday, August 09, 2006

eLearning DevCon Day 2 Recap

Day 2 at eLearning DevCon was another hit and miss day in relation to content. Here is a highlight of the breakout sessions today for those who couldn't attend or attend a specific session:

  • Mobile eLearning, a Reality (Bob Sanregret)- Bob Sanregret of Hot Lava Software didn't disappoint with an exciting session on Mobile eLearning. Unlike other conferences, most vendors who present usually spend the entire session plugging their own product. In this case, Bob provided a good balance of what he has produced (without it being a sales pitch) along with other case studies.
  • Instant Development of PDA/Mobile Games for eLearning (Dan Lim)- Dan Lim gave a very impressive demonstration of how to develop games for PDAs or other mobile enable devices. The tool he created was easy and used a simple text file to create an XML file that was bound to the .swf file. The key question however is, does he have this product available for sale or download as opensource- sadly the answer is No and I left the session feeling like someone just described the best hamburger in the world, but then said you cannot have it.
  • MPEG4, Flash 8 Video (Nick Floro)- One of the exciting new features of Flash 8 is it's ability to edit video. This session should have been very informative and useful, but sadly, due to technical difficulities, it was mostly Nick talking to a blank presentation screen.
  • Authoring eLearning for the iPod and More (Troy Stein)- Troy provided an excellent session on how easy it is to create and publish eLearning Video content for Podcasting. This is a session that I will go in to further detail here once the presentations are posted on the DecCon website.
  • Building a HTML/XML based Rapid eLearning Development (Jeff Moyes)- Potentially a good session that I needed, but most of the time was spent describing the coding line per line in one component without any showing the end result. This session either needed more time or multiple sessions to really bring everything together.

I will try to post today's sessions later this evening, but for now, I will play tourist in Salt Lake for a few hours.

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