LiveCode Player for 5.5

[Judy Perry]

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.

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.
>