On 10/01/2009, at 6:50 AM, Matt Morgan-May wrote:
Hi,
Excuse me for jumping in here, especially (in this case) as a Flash
partisan. But I fail to see how this kind of project can be anything
other
than a good thing overall.
What I don't understand is why people are instantly critical of
projects
that are actually attempting to increase access to new technology.
I've
heard a constant drumbeat of "don't use Flash: it's inaccessible" in
the
years I've been involved in the field. But if we don't have people
pushing
that envelope, doesn't that make that statement self-fulfilling
prophecy?
There are lots of us out there working on improving the
accessibility of
both existing and future content authored in Flash.
There are many arguments to be made for HTML -- I made loads of them
while
working for W3C, all of which I would stand by today -- but it is
not all
things to all people. The fact is that many educators have found
that they
can use Flash to teach their students effectively. I'm not an
educator by
profession, but my wife is, and she prefers Flash over HTML/CSS/JS to
develop her courseware. If you were to tell her she's wrong,
especially
before seeing what kind of work she does, I think you'd probably find
yourself dodging a couple shelves' worth of education texts. Telling a
professional their tools are wrong is not the most endearing of
approaches.
In my opinion, the best one can do is to learn what they're doing,
and offer
ways to make that output more efficient, more inclusive, and easier to
produce.
Teachers aren't usually web developers, and we shouldn't want them
to be. So
I'm all for companies taking on the technical problems so teachers
can be
teachers, and so on.
Ultimately teachers should aim to teach the skills that are required
of students entering the industry. It’s not uncommon that many
secondary and tertiary IT and web media courses are grossly outdated.
From my experience this is mostly attributed to the teacher’s
education in the field which they received when they did their
tertiary education in order to teach, and have since not remained up
to date with new developments and sadly even standards. Money and a
requirement to regularly attend courses to keep educators up to date
help in this regard but nothing beats personal interest—the high
school IT teacher that in their own time is actively involved in his
or her field will be more likely to teach his students about the
latest relevant and exciting bleeding edge technologies.
On a side note, my personal opinion on web media courses focusing on
rich web content is that they should still entail the bare basics of
HTML, XHTML, and CSS, with a toe-dip into JavaScript. These
technologies are so fundamental to the web, and given their role as
standards they should be part of any web-related courses.
Just my 2¢. Thanks for raising this topic. (:
—Pascal
Thanks,
M
Accessibility Engineer, Adobe
Christie Mason said:
Exactly right. I've sadly watched Flash take over eLearning and
still
haven't figured out the attraction, except that it offers the
control of PPT
while appearing to be "rich". There's only a very few types of
web sites
that still use Flash for delivering primary content - media sites,
those
that focus more on "look at me" instead of being a resource to
their site
guests, and eLearning.
Since, supposedly, eLearning is about offering web based resources
for
learning it just doesn't make sense to me that it has ignored all
the ways
the web has supported, continues to support, learning w/o using
Flash.
Flash on the web is like cooking with garlic. A little adds depth,
a lot is
inedible.
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---
Simon Pascal Klein
Concept designer
(w) http://klepas.org
(e) kle...@klepas.org
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