New Spaces
I’ve been introduced to my new work spaces. During my leave I had originally intended to teach for the ASU. Over the summer it appeared that I wasn’t a good fit for that opportunity, so I was directed to apply for a research assistant position. Dr. Brian Nelson has been my teacher twice during my program. He’s a great guy and very enthusiastic about student learning. If only I had teachers like him in some of my engineering courses. But I digress…
Here’s a snapshot of my new work area at ASU where I will be working on a research project dealing with instruction via virtual worlds:
Also, today is the first day of my internship with Hospice of the Valley. I had originally heard of the organization through one of the MCC nursing faculty. She saw some of the stuff we were promoting in the CTL at MCC with an e-learning platform and toolset called “Breeze”, which was a technology that was acquired by Macromedia from a company called Presidia. It basically allows for people with a PowerPoint skill set to create cross-platform rich media presentations to be shared online. So I came on an off day to Hospice of the Valley to do a demo of some of the things we were doing at MCC with breeze, which that led to my contact and opportunity to intern at HOV. It is my understanding that it was my initial visit that led to the company choosing Macromedia Breeze as their e-learning platform of choice.
Shortly after that first visit, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems. It’s just one bigger fish eating the previous big fish in the software business, it seems. Since it was acquired by Adobe, they’ve named the product “Connect Presenter”. At the time Macromedia was running the show, there was a product culture that got created around the name Breeze. People in the PowerPoint world would often refer to PowerPoint slide stacks as “Preso’s” (PREEZ-o’s) The converted presentations were affectionately named “Breezo’s” as a result.
Adobe has grown tremendously in their acquirement of Macromedia’s technologies. There literally were people who thought that Macromedia walked on water because their media authoring tools and technologies powered what most people saw on their computer web browser: (HTML via Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.) I have to admit, I had some initial concern about what would happen to Macromedia’s technologies once Adobe took over. I’m happy to say that I’m okay with what has taken place. I imagine that most of the company staff remained with Adobe and were around during the transition to new products, and that has led to not only a smooth transition, but also to some absolutely cool stuff like Flex (which was a Macromedia-bred technology and one that I’m still learning), and now AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Both of these technologies I’m going to try to push to the respective communities which support them to get some e-learning apps developed and hopefully contribute back to those communities.
To close out this post, when Adobe took over they kept most of the product names of the Macromedia line. However, the Breeze product line got transitioned to a new name. They call it Connect Presenter, now. I don’t know, but “Connecto’s” just don’t roll off the tongue quite the same way….
Leave a Reply