I also like to make occasional visits to Google Labs and Adobe Labs to "keep up" with the tech tools they are working on and to test drive any beta versions available. April's Big Question from Learning Circuits is "How to Keep up?" This is in reference the immense and rapidly expanding technology tools. It is tough to stay on top of all the emerging tools. However, being involved in an e-learning community is a big help. MORE

What about Adobe products vs. Articulate vs. Qarbon ? Bill Sawyer posted in response to my Conversation Topics post. You can find posts aggregated via eLearning Learning - 100 Conversations. I've not met Bill before, and this was a great way to start. He is definitely challenged and thinking a lot about training standards. Bill has quite a few questions in his post: eLearning is suffering from the Beta/VHS or Blu-ray/HD-DVD challenge. MORE

The panel consisted of representatives from Adobe Captivate , Articulate and Qarbon , along with Jay Cross (yes, I know, I wondered whether he'd just turned up in the wrong room and, given that he's always got something interesting to say, they just allowed him to join in). I attended the panel discussion on 'the future of rapid e-learning tools' at the eLearning Guild's Annual Gathering in Boston today with a misunderstanding. I thought I knew what 'rapid e-learning' meant. MORE

The Learning Circuits Blog Big Question for July is 'how should e-learning developers choose their authoring tools given the proliferation of tools on the market?' Well, I posted on this subject just last week (see Confused of Brighton ) and even listed my own top ten tools , authoring or otherwise, in a subsequent post. Nevertheless, I believe I should address the Big Question in a more measured way than in last week's rant, so here goes. MORE

The next generation of authoring tools included a handful of really serious players, notably Authorware (now with Adobe) and Toolbook (now with SumTotal), both still going although not so strongly. Now, to arrive at a manageable number of alternatives, you have to sub-divide the market into categories: Rapid tools ( Articulate , Captivate , Atlantic Link ) as opposed to whatever the others are called ( Authorware , Lectora , etc.). MORE

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For example, in 2007 PowerPoint to eLearning Shootout they compared: Articulate www.articulate.com Atlantic Link www.atlantic-link.co.uk PointeCast www.pointecast.com Qarbon www.qarbon.com SCATE www.scate.com Udutu www.udutu.com Atlantic link scored the highest in the shoot-out. Rapid eLearning Tools Satisfaction from the eLearningGuild Research reported Feb 2007 - Course Authoring and Rapid eLearning Tool Satisfaction See also Software Simulation Tools. Page update Mar 2008. MORE