Adobe Acrobat: Old Technology, but New Features

On 18 October, the Center hosted a technology demo by Adobe representative, Ali Hanyaloglu, who showed us the wonders of Adobe Acrobat Professional. We'll be posting a podcast of his presentation in the Idea Center this next week, but in the meantime you'll probably want to go to their website and view the demo for Acrobat Pro. I think you'll be surprised by all the new features.

Not only has Acrobat become more like MS Word (in its annotation and highlighting features), but it's also become more collaborative in the bargain. For that matter, like many instructional technologies (e.g., Smarttech's "Notebook" software that goes with their SmartBoards), Acrobat has become a "content management" system, rivalling traditional and much, much more costly learning management systems (LMS). Indeed, the likes of Blackboard and WebCT might become obsolete with these new lower-cost solutions.

As a side note, I should say that I inquired about LMS solutions when attending the Nelinet "Web 2.0" conference at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. The (admittedly one) Olin student I spoke with suggested that the student body rebelled when presented with Blackboard as the College's LMS solution. Now, I didn't verify the claim, but it does suggest how outdated BB has become; when some of the nation's top engineering students find it cumbersome, confining, and clunky, companies like BB should sit up and take notice. Technology moves at a fast pace, and today's monopoly will become tomorrow's dinosaur.


Cheers,
Sean