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The Elephant Flies, Soars (Pachyderm / Learning Object Dialogue Day)

The energy was electric yesterday at our system's first introduction to "Pachyderm" at our Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day. The reaction to the potential of Pachyderm and the level of participation in the afternoon activities were beyond our wildest expectations.

Much had to do with the enthusiasm guest speaker Peter Samis brought with him from SFMOMA and his demonstration with examples from Pachyderm products Making Sense of Modern Art and Ansel Adams at 100 . Quite a few of our participants said that they may have briefly skimmed these sites previously when we announced this event, the presentation by Peter that highlighted the power of framing questions and context around a concept, and connecting it to other contextual layered screens, really made it click.

We had our concerns about faculty from Math, Chemistry, Economics, Medical Transcription, Reading, English, Biology, etc connecting with rich content about art. They did. We had them do an initial activity with Pachyderm storyboards using as content the art work on display from the Paradise Valley Community College Buxton Art Collection. They not only were willing to do this, we almost had to forcefully get them to stop the activity.

Things to be posted in the next weeks include Peter's presentation, event photos, the video of Warren Buxton with the stories about his art collection, samples of the storyboards produced by the participants, and the ideas they generated in their discipline discussion groups.

We avoided spiral paths down to definitions of "learning objects", "re-usable", meta-data, etc, and instead generated ideas on the potential and content ideas for what could be done in a Pachyderm environment.

Here's the news for the Pachy programming team. Our faculty want to use this very much. Next week. Earlier if possible ;-)

The elephant is soaring.