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eZedia News
Summer Software Review
Content Creation Simplified by eZediaMX
By Michel Mersereau
Higher Learning - Technology Serving Education
TEACH Magazine
Sept/Oct 2002
Content delivery and content creation - often worlds apart. Macromedia's recent perspective on the growth of the second generation of Web and multimedia delivery emphasizes the transition from provider-centric to user-centric content models, and with scheduled releases of powerful authoring software designed to bridge this often-terminable gap, it is taking steps to accommodate just that.
While this bodes well for professional media developers, amateur users often feel the pinch of the dreaded learning curve accompanying such transitions. eZedia Inc. hopes to capitalize on this by providing both professional and amateur content developers the ability to create, manage, and deliver rich multimedia content in an intuitive, user-friendly authoring environment replete with tools usually reserved for creative professionals alone.
More often than not, e-based educators face the twofold dilemma of having to develop and provide suitable material to students. This involves a marked investment in time. In a recent statement by the National Education Technology Standards (NETS) project, a set of standards addressing specific skills required by post-secondary educators in preparation of e-based learning implementations is laid out. It details the need for educators to be familiar with technology operations and concepts, as well as the planning and designing of e-learning environments. Familiarizing oneself with new media content creation is a laborious, time-intensive task, and educators who wish to accommodate these standards face great challenges. eZediaMX promotes itself as not only being able to accommodate these parameters in a user-friendly environment, but also provides educators with a flexible content creation tool that grows with the user as his skills grow.
More than simply a layout and design engine, the program allows educators to create logic-centric learning applications and problems tailored to respond to end user input. Its content creation environment is both object-oriented and visually simplistic in terms of the layout and handling. This premise is what affords eZediaMX the ability to create and manage multimedia content with such ease. Once inside, eZedia content is created through a process of layering, positioning, masking, animating, and linking existing multimedia content.
For example, you may wish to provide students with a brief, animated multimedia presentation in the hopes of exploring motion dynamics. You may wish to construct a template whereby students, provided with animated content, are required to input variables describing various dynamics occurring within the animation. eZediaMX allows you to not only create the content, but also assign logic parameters that respond to the input of the students. Traditionally, this would be accomplished with programs such as Macromedia's Flash or Fireworks Studio. However, content creators would be limited by the degree of compatibility with foreign file formats (such as QuickTime movies), and would ultimately be forced to rely on scripting in order to provide any degree of interactivity. With eZedia, however, users select from a wide range of source content such as PNG images and QuickTime movie content, which they can then drag onto the content creation window. Once imported, content can be positioned as desired, and then linked or animated (eZedia relies on path-based animation as opposed to Flash's cell-based format).
Linking, and thus allowing objects to interact with each other, is remarkably simple. eZedia provides a unique linking tool by which users simply draw a path between the objects they desire to link (this is similar to "targeting" without the scripting in Flash and Live Motion). Once the objects are linked, users apply desired parameters (such as animation loops) that proceed based on the user's input via a linked button.
eZediaMX has sought to position itself well in the educational market, and has done so by conforming to the pedagogical guidelines put forth by the NETS project. In this regard, eZediaMX is unique among content authoring applications in its ability to provide educators with the necessary tools to create object- or logic-oriented content without resorting to the arduous task of coding and scripting. Content created via eZediaMX is provided by way of the proprietary eZedia player. While eZedia's end user base is limited in this fashion (it simply does not have the installed user base afforded to Macromedia, for example), it is ideal for educators seeking to provide and maintain educational multimedia content within a relatively small, controlled environment.
© 2002 TEACH Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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