Tuesday September 20, 2005 
Today's Page Hits: 18
Tuesday September 20, 2005 I'm attending the Digital Hollywood event here in Santa Monica as part of sharing best practices in gaming and education.
First observation is the lack of free wireless! no further comment.
Second observation is the buzz around the gaming and Hollywood coming together and wondering what the future holds.
Not surprisingly one of the biggest topics of discussion is Digital Rights management (DRM) and what that means for the publishing industry. Exactly the same concerns we see in the education publishing world but that is only part of the problem.
I recently worked on a solution for an education authority to offer material through set top boxes using Video on Demand (VOD) and IPTV. The obvious challenge was defining the business rules to be implemented through one of the many 'open standards'. Like most design problems the there are multiple technical solutions to the problem but the real issue is defining the problem correctly in the first place. Accurately describing the business domain is the most difficult and time consuming part of any project.
Developing a solution for education requires us to go further and look at the interaction models of the media instead of just the distribution of media. Getting the assets to the user is a very small part of the system. Nearly all learning models require some level of interaction and the biggest challenge of a successful interactive learning platform is the flexibility of that 2-way interaction.
This conference has shown that Hollywood is still focussed on the protection of content and has not yet moved to the services around the content. The user is still the un-invoved user - being broadcast to and less involved. Personally I prefer the challenge of the Learning Management System (LMS) co-ordination.
I have found more fruitful conversations with the smaller interactive simulation companies that understand the technical challenges that these interactions pose on a larger scale. Most of these discussion have gone down the route of 'we have some cool interaction technology but how do we scale?'.
There is, however, a very interesting move to the gaming sector by Hollywood and more recently TV broadcasters. The obvious link is for publishers to re-use their assets like the spin off games from blockbusters. For me the next step is community building allowing re-purposing of those assets based on 'chunked' content. They could learn a great deal from our work in large scale teaching and learning systems.
First observation is the lack of free wireless! no further comment.
Second observation is the buzz around the gaming and Hollywood coming together and wondering what the future holds.
Not surprisingly one of the biggest topics of discussion is Digital Rights management (DRM) and what that means for the publishing industry. Exactly the same concerns we see in the education publishing world but that is only part of the problem.
I recently worked on a solution for an education authority to offer material through set top boxes using Video on Demand (VOD) and IPTV. The obvious challenge was defining the business rules to be implemented through one of the many 'open standards'. Like most design problems the there are multiple technical solutions to the problem but the real issue is defining the problem correctly in the first place. Accurately describing the business domain is the most difficult and time consuming part of any project.
Developing a solution for education requires us to go further and look at the interaction models of the media instead of just the distribution of media. Getting the assets to the user is a very small part of the system. Nearly all learning models require some level of interaction and the biggest challenge of a successful interactive learning platform is the flexibility of that 2-way interaction.
This conference has shown that Hollywood is still focussed on the protection of content and has not yet moved to the services around the content. The user is still the un-invoved user - being broadcast to and less involved. Personally I prefer the challenge of the Learning Management System (LMS) co-ordination.
I have found more fruitful conversations with the smaller interactive simulation companies that understand the technical challenges that these interactions pose on a larger scale. Most of these discussion have gone down the route of 'we have some cool interaction technology but how do we scale?'.
There is, however, a very interesting move to the gaming sector by Hollywood and more recently TV broadcasters. The obvious link is for publishers to re-use their assets like the spin off games from blockbusters. For me the next step is community building allowing re-purposing of those assets based on 'chunked' content. They could learn a great deal from our work in large scale teaching and learning systems.