About five months ago a small group of people at Penn State were charged to do a review of the Pachyderm project. They were part of a "Hot Team" that I put together to help inform us its overall potential. At the time they came back with sort of a mixed bag of results -- I believed at the time it had a lot to do with how Pachyderm is designed to help you design ... does that make any sense. Didn't think so. Pachyderm has an orientation that is a lot different than what most of us are used to. I believed then that our team went into it with their own perspectives and previous experiences in front of their eyes. I felt as though that contributed to the mixed results we got.
Flash forward to today and I just saw that D'Arcy is pointing us to the Pachyderm Showcase. I took a look through a bunch of the examples and really liked what I saw. I am still not 100% convinced it is the best tool for really big (course level) designs, but it looks like you can create some killer objects that can help lead some serious learning. At any rate, we may have to go back and look again now that there are some amazing examples to help us adjust our perspectives.
Heya Cole. Pachyderm is definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution. It works well for what it was designed for - interactive nonlinear presentation-style websites, with media management and resizing taken care of.
It won't fit for everything or everyone. For example, if I was to restart our Faculty of Ed's ePortfolio project, I would rather swap out Pachyderm and replace it with iWeb. Failing that, Pachyderm should work OK. Failing that, they could learn to use Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc... All good things to learn, but not something that can be expected within an already packed courseload.
Posted by: D'Arcy Norman | 04/03/2006 at 08:00 PM
Yeah ... I see Pachyderm as a killer nonlinear tool for developing very compelling pieces of content. Don't get me wrong, what I am saying is that it is an amazing tool for the right kinds of materials. When we did our initial test of it, we went in with the perception that it was a large-scale eLearning authoring environment. What I can see clearly now is that it is a killer app for developing very targeted types of learning opportunities. Absolutely a piece to content creation toolset. We have been searching for the one big toolset for managing the life-cycle of a courseware design project. Something more in lines with some of the apps I had built back in the day ... like this http://colecamplese.com/?p=231 ... we'll be heading back to the testing block and putting Pachyderm back through some new tests.
Posted by: Cole | 04/03/2006 at 08:00 PM