Pink Pachyderms?

"The name Pachyderm came from a Thai restaurant called Arawan in Sausalito, California. Using that as the code name for our authoring and publishing tool was the result of thirty minutes of debate, and while that decision was perhaps made with haste, the desire to build a custom tool came from five years of multimedia development experience at the museum." -- from the opening paragraph of "The Why, What, and How of a Custom Authoring and Publishing System: The Creation of Pachyderm."

I first posted about Pachyderm some time ago. My frustration then was that it was impossible to find out anything about how the critter works. After doing some more digging, I have come up with the link to an article that explains it. Pachyderm is, essentially, flat text files in Flash templates. There is no metadata. I am still in the dark as to just how interactive the resulting applications are, except that they seem to be similar to an educational exhibit in a museum (allowing more for exploration within the limits of the underlying database than for instruction). I think the exploration is limited just to the database, not allowing for searches out into the Web, but I could be wrong about that. It sounds like the museums that are working with Pachyderm are trying to make it more of an actual e-Learning tool, but to me, at the moment, it looks more like a tool for publishing reference resources. But it is an interesting relative of the Canadian Learning Object Repositories and worth understanding. -- BB

1/31/2004 Update: Pachyderm storyboards. May help explain things.

The Pachyderm is Coming to Town.

No, this is not about the circus. Well, we hope not. Tomorrow (Jan 30) is our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day event for about 70 registered participants from our colleges, held at Paradise Valley Community College (our "Dialogue Days" are one day special events, workshops, etc that are organized by our office in response to requests of faculty or promising trends, etc).

Pachyderm is one of the most promising tools that would actually be able to build something useful from so-called Learning Objects. Developed by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a vehicle to allow non-technical staff (museum curators) to create rich multimedia web/CD/kiosk experiences that add layers of context around the museum exhibits, and it is constructed via a web interface that accesses a database of digitized assets. It is not a small leap to say this is a similar need for faculty, so SFMOMA in conjunction with the New Media Consortium (NMC) have launched the Pachyderm 2.0 project with this goal in mind- to create an open-source authoring platform for educators.

5:13:45 PM