Why Education Matters to Flex
October 31st, 2007
Adobe recently made a major announcement regarding their strategy for Flex promotion. To quick summary is that Adobe will be offering Flex Builder for free to faculty and students at education institutions worldwide [news article]. Many of you know that I work at Georgia Tech (and previously at Middle Tennessee State University), and I believe that this announcement is huge.
Initially, some developers in the commercial field might not see the importance of this announcement. However, students eventually become developers, employers, potential clients, consultants, and decision makers. If these people can become captivated with a technology, they can begin to see its value in their work. This became even more clear to me as one of the senior Georgia Tech administrators accompanied me to Adobe Max in Chicago. He was extremely impressed with the GIS demo that utilized Flex (one of his areas of expertise is GIS). Since the conference he has included a Flex project in at least one research proposal. He saw the potential and has embraced the technology as a means of visualizing his research.
By allowing Flex Builder to be free for students and faculty, we will see not only more Flex projects, but we will see even more important Flex projects. Sure, I can code a search engine that mashes-up data from many different sources and displays the results in a three dimensional view, but what if I could develop an interactive experience where Civil Engineering students could better understand the development of complex structures? These kind of ideas are already being discussed, and Adobe’s move only accelerates them.
|
Comments
| Trackback |
Del.icio.us |
Digg |
Technorati
9 comments on “Why Education Matters to Flex”
01
I wholeheartedly agree. I work for a relatively large educational institution and I’m trying to convince the business department that including this in the curriculum will now be a lot easier now that the IDE for developing Flex apps is going to be a lot easier now. I think they will buy into it, especially if I help train faculty and help them develop course materials.
I have a couple of questions…
What are you using for the code highlighting examples for ActionScript on your blog posts. Is it a WordPress plugin? Blogging and developing course materials using a good AS highlighter tool will be key to our success.
Do you know if Adobe or anyone else is developing course materials aimed towards beginning programming students? We know Adobe Press has books out there that are more or less reference materials for experienced developers that want to adopt Flex/AIR, but they aren’t necessarily designed with programming assignments or otherwise aimed at academia.
Your thoughts/suggestions?
02
First, for code highlighting I use iG:Syntax Hiliter:
http://blog.igeek.info/still-fresh/category/wp-plugins/igsyntax-hiliter/
Second, I am not aware of a course that is being developed, but my hope is that one will be developed soon. (It also would be interesting to see if the open-source community could come together and develop a part of this). For the time being, some of the books (such as “Programming Flex 2″), could serve as a curriculum until a more standard academic course is developed.
03
@Jeffery:
“Do you know if Adobe or anyone else is developing course materials aimed towards beginning programming students?”
yes. Talk to your local Adobe User Group manager that’s on the User Group email list. Ask them about the “Flex Camp” “FulldayIntro”. They may be able to do a Flex Camp in your area to kick-start things. The materials are part (samples/taster) of a forthcoming Flex curricula being developed at the moment. Whether it will eventually only be available for Adobe Certification partners or as general curriculum materials I don’t know yet.
While it makes sence in one way that Adobe give educational institutions everything they need to grow the RIA development base in the future, keep in mind that course materials are the “bread and butter” of training orginisations. If Adobe do give things away, the people who have made an industry providing training for individuals will be affected. How would you like it if you were charging students for your teaching efforts and along comes someone that gives the same away for free? Perhaps all education should be free and the efforts made by Stanford University in opening themselves up to the world will be the model of the future - but we may not be there yet.
@David:
“It also would be interesting to see if the open-source community could come together and develop a part of this”.
Perhaps they already are. There is a lot of Flex-related resources starting to appear now. And, more importantly, there’s Adobe employees working directly with the community to push this. Have a look at the multitude of examples produced by Peter DeHaan from the Flex team:
http://blog.flexexamples.com/
additionally, Adobe themselves are actively working elsewhere in this area: see this as an example:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us
How would you guys feel if your “teaching” turning out to be simply facilitating what’s already out there in the community? That you didn’t actually develop any curricula but that you “mashed” what was already there and taught around the edges to keep it flowing?
I know it’s something that is a talking point in my circles…
04
I totally agree that there are many great resources out there. The community has responded in an amazing way. The hard work will be organizing this into a linear semester-style class.
The other difficulty that would have to be overcome is the distaste many university professors have for “community” information. Many of the people who develop tutorials don’t have Ph.D.’s or Master’s Degrees. In many ways - they have reasons to be cautious. However, I feel that in the end they sacrifice relevant content for doctoral authors.
05
@David,
OK, comminity resources to one side for the moment… lets look at what companies can provide - ones that have more budget to spend on education (in certain sectors) than universities…
What if Adobe provided FULL curricula for ALL their products: all the CS3 suite, all Flex, ColdFusion, LiveCycle? What if they provided this to *anyone*? and certification centers sprung up everywhere? You’re looking at Flex for your business students - but how about the IT faculty? Creative Industries? Multimedia?
and what if Microsoft did exactly the same thing? In fact, software companies did more than just write and sell software - they provide the whole ecosystem (free training, resources, support forums, maybe even job placement for graduates) for _anyone_ to have a piece of the action?
you *could* argue that your institution does more than just teach students how to use software - teach them the theory and to develop critical minds. But with the commercialisation of software comes the commercialisation of getting the developers of tomorrow on the Adobe side or Microsoft side. And teaching more than what button to push.
Sure, good quality face to face teaching cannot be beaten. But have a look at the easily (and cheap to produce) video-on-demand series that Adobe does, their live Breeze presentations by recognised industry leaders, their forums staffed by employees answering questions….
… if you had a healthy on-line/distance-education enrollment yesterday, would you have the same tomorrow?
my guess is that, some faculties and educational institutions will not notice a thing. But I can see others having to re-invent themselves as the lay-person takes control of their own education by embracing what’s already on offer. This has always been the case but technology is becoming the great “leveller”, making it easier, distance no barrier and finance no problem… and all students have to do is reach out to the many choices and simply take what’s on offer.
06
You certainly bring up some good points. I am going to be keeping a close eye on what local institutions here are doing (and of course post about it).
07
@Jeffrey “Do you know if Adobe or anyone else is developing course materials aimed towards beginning programming students?”
A colleague and I have given it a go: http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Actionscript_3 .That’s written with master students or independent learners in mind. We try to provide the knowledge required to go and design a Flex app. We don’t attempt to provide a book on the Foundations of the language. That said, no reason why undergrad students could benefit from this as well.
That work started about a month ago and only the “absolute novice” level has been fully written. This is a wiki, so you are very welcome to contribute and help improve the resource ;-). The license is share alike, so you are free to borrow and transform. If you do so, please let us know, so that we can borrow in return.
@David. “The other difficulty that would have to be overcome is the distaste many university professors have for “community” information. ” Well, I left an academic job for a freelance one two years ago because of my distate for the distate of collaborative practices in universities, which had, in my view, disastrous effects on the quality of the research effort in my field (cognitive psychology). See above, open wiki, share alike license… yipee. Hey, we have even created a Ning network to support the users of these tutorials (teachers or students): http://as3edu.ning.com/ . Ning was chosen because of its great community tools as well as the facility there is to embed swf file in any post (registration on this network is by invitation for now… contact me if you want to join)
08
(sure, I can produce all these syntactic errors and be an ex-academic… English is not my first language and I am not very good at writing in these small comment boxes).
09
@widged - Thanks so much for the link! I am checking it out now. I will probably be putting together a page that lists all of the resources for educational institutions (with your stuff plus the new Adobe curriculum). Also, I would love to be a member of the Ning network.
Leave a Reply