adobe captivate 4, learning 2.0 and the perpetual beta …..

while browsing the net for using various webservices like youtube,flickr,google maps etc and thinking how they are being used in eLearning world I chanced upon this ebook. I was late to notice this but still. The concept is called “e learning 2.0” and is explained as use of web technologies in education. This term is extension of more famous term web 2.0.

I am also thinking of how a eLearning tool like Adobe Captivate 4 can help in this phenomenon. You have already seen how youtube videos can be inserted in adobe captivate 4 slides. That was just the glimpse. More advanced things can be done like posting the comment, adding the rating, complains etc depending on how much they open for Flash. Similarly there could be ways to use flickr which is a photoshare service. Learning 2.0 also mentions it quite frequently but I am yet to find a broad use case in which a tool can help in creating content using Flickr. Ofcourse showing a set of photographs with predefined search string is the easiest of them but I am not sure if it will be used or practical courses. May be it is my ignorance of service which I have just began to use or may be the informal nature of these services. There are some interesting things which can be done with google maps which I will share shortly.

And this also reminds me one of the favourite terms of web 2.0 – perpetual beta which is a system in which a product never leaves development stage of beta and allows developers to consistently release new features which might not be fully tested. You see this trend in the “beta” logo which comes with many web 2.0 services. This also says users must be treated as co developers and they add to the product feature set also. Which again leaves me with thought that the features will never stop coming even after Adobe Captivate 4 is released and the users can be part of it also by developing such services on the tool. This is one of the contribution of Adobe Captivate to web 2.0 phenomenon.