Exciting new online comms and collaboration tools from Adobe

I had planned today to continue my series on organizational learning and e-learning ecosystems, but I have become aware of an interesting new hosted productivity and collaboration suite from Adobe called Acrobat.com, so I thought I'd discuss that today. Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary is known to respond with the acronym "IMFA" (It's My Airline) when others disagree with his decisions, so in the same spirit, IMFB.

Now read on...

Aligning with their stated aim to become a major force in so-called webtop software, Adobe released two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Product manager Erik Larson has stated that Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web.

It is [Adobe's] intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past.

Acrobat.com is a combination of three online services:

• Adobe ConnectNow (a "lite" version of Acrobat Connect 7 for web conferencing and desktop collaboration)
• Adobe Buzzword (and online word processor)
• Adobe Share (online file sharing)

In my view, this represents a serious attempt by Adobe to compete with many of Google's Web 2.0 tools like Google Docs, YouTube and Picasa, as well as solutions like Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting, usually associated with organizational collaboration.

Buzzword
Buzzword is the default word processor in the suite. it enables multiple collaborators to edit and comment documents. As well as providing a pretty nice WYSIWYG editor, tabs along the bottom of the UI represent the people who have accessed the document most recently, as well as their status (author, reviewer, etc.).

Uniquely for a web-based word processor, Buzzword paginates documents, supports a range of fonts, and lets you generate a pretty good equivalent to a PDF document. However, this is still in beta, so you will likely encounter some frustrations if you are used to creating documents in a desktop environment (i.e. during cut-and-paste operations) and there is no easy way to export a document to a blog or other Web publishing system other than via the previously mentioned cut-and-paste.

However, I have found this to be the case in similar apps such as Windows Live Writer (which I'm using to create this post); the software is still buggy - I'm happy to live with this in a beta app, though some might not be.

Adobe Share
This is a file-sharing application that focuses on document sharing.
You get one gigabyte of free storage, and it enables you to embed a Flash preview of your documents into any Web page (quite similar to FlashPaper). Adobe say that this enables anyone to download and print a PDF of the file (though I have yet to test this myself). I guess that you could describe this tool as 'Flickr on steroids', given Share's facility to make available a range of document types in an environment that those familiar with that tool can easily appreciate.

ConnectNow
I love ConnectNow. I've long been an advocate of online communication and collaboration tools as a powerful solution to the challenges organizations face, particularly if employees work in distributed teams, as well as for hosting training and non-formal learning interventions. I have to declare an interest here: the organization I work for relies heavily on Adobe Connect Pro (currently version 6) for training and informational purposes and I think that it's a great system, not least because it uses the Flash plug-in, so no large player downloads or quirky clients to be installed.



Even in it's cut-down form, making this functionality publicly available is going to be very popular (no more excuses not to talk to the relations in New Zealand!).
ConnectNow allows up to three people have free online meetings, with

• screen sharing
• desktop video
• voice conferencing
• IM-type chat
• white-boarding

Note that significant portions of Connect's functionality have been removed, including the recording facility, as well as the asynchronous meeting playback facility. You can also forget about hosting your on-demand e-learning content on the system, because that's been excised too, though that doesn't mean that you can't use the tool for synchronous learning, such as small-group online mentoring and so on.

Interestingly, ConnectNow (kind of) replicates Connect Pro's ability to integrate with telephone conferencing system via a fee-based toll line (currently only available in some territories like the US, UK, Germany etc). Now that the Flex-based UI uses Adobe Flash 9 rather than Flash 6, the screen looks great - a small thing, but it's attractiveness will certainly enhance users' enjoyment of the product.

Other commentators have suggested that the business model is clearly pay-for-what-you-use:

while right now the service is just a free beta, restrictions on things like file space and number of users will presumably be addressed by monthly subscriptions – moving Adobe from a licensor of desktop software to a web-based software-as-a-service company. We’ve already seen that with Photoshop Express, and with Acrobat.com, Adobe now has all of their major applications available in a Web-based version too.

I would assert that while this may be the plan at the moment, the ubiquity of other free-to-use applications (not to mention the competition in this increasingly hot marketspace) will force Adobe to either make these tools available gratis or include so many extra features to entice paying users that Acrobat.com will becomes a professional-level hosted solution, which presumably is not the consumer market that Adobe are attempting to dominate.

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More on defining e-learning, elearning, eLearning...

As I wrote yesterday, Don Morrison has defined e-learning as:

The continuous assimilation of knowledge and skills by adults stimulated by synchronous and asynchronous learning events – and sometimes Knowledge management outputs – which are authored, delivered engaged with, supported and administered using internet technologies.

(2004, p.4)

I briefly touched upon "continuous assimilation of knowledge and skills by adults"; andragogy.

Today, I'm going to talk a bit more about synchronous and asynchronous learning events. A proportion of the content I develop for the workplace includes non-formal informational and knowledge content delivered to learners (which I call "Information Sessions") via a number of synchronous and asynchronous channels. We will delve into the detail of this at another time, but for now it is useful to note the meanings of these categories. Colvin Clark and Mayer in e-learning and the Science of Instruction (2003) define synchronous delivery simply as that which occurs simultaneously, whereas asynchronous “occurs at different times” (p.201). I would suggest that implicit in the term ‘synchronous’ is the term ‘collaborative’ – that is, two or more learners, possibly in the presence of an instructor or domain expert, participating (remotely) in a learning event and exchanging information and knowledge.

In Designing World-class E-Learning Roger Schank (2002) calls this “e-learning by doing” (p.13) and cites the industry-wide use of computer-based air flight simulators in aviation as training tools to understand the potential of collaboration to develop learners in situated environments. Equivalently, implicit in the term ‘asynchronous’ is, I suggest, the notion of self-paced content. As Morrison points out though, “the flexibility of internet technology creates grey areas around the notion of synchronous and asynchronous” (p.7). He gives the example of a virtual class which “starts life” as a synchronous learning event, is recorded and can thenceforward be played back on-demand by learners. In a sense, Morrison argues, the presenter and participants taking part in the original event become co-authors of an asynchronous learning event. This, in fact, could serve as a rather broad working definition of the category of learning that the Information Sessions inhabit.

References:

Clark, R. C. & Mayer R. (2003) e-learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning, San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer

Morrison, D. (2004) E-Learning Strategies: how to get implementation and delivery right first time, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Schank, R. (2002) Designing World-Class e-Learning. London, McGraw-Hill