Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Have you noticed that educational software has been getting dejá vu for a little while now. It goes back to 2Simple releasing a new version of Developing Tray, that old BBC favourite, well now we’re into the early to mid 90s with HyperStudio making a comeback. HyperStudio came to prominence following the withdrawal of HyperCard by Apple, and the release of the first affordable colour Apple, the Macintosh LC into schools. Versions for Windows and the Acorn Archimedes soon followed, and it was the most popular multimedia authoring software principally because it used logo as its scripting language. The web and html effectively saw an end to school focussed multimedia authoring software. However, it seems that all was not lost, the purchase of the the company that owned HyperStudio in 2007 by Software Kiev led to a new version being written for Mac OS X. They have now released a version 5. One can only wonder why?

Their marketing line seems to be to appeal to all those, now middle aged, teachers and perhaps students that are now teachers who found the software so engaging back in the 90s. Obviously the new product has to fit in with what kids are interested in doing today, so new features include exporting finished presentations to your iPod, importing music from iTunes and video from YouTube. All these might seem appropriate if the developers had not missed the fact that it’s social networking and online Web 2.0 apps that make the grade today. HyperStudio can publish to the web, but still requires a plug-in to do so, just like it did in 1998.

I can only speculate that we’ve now reached the point where teachers who were cutting edge in the 1990s, have slowed down enough to, rather like their pre-decessors who hankered after removable chalkboards and could therefore keep their most useful diagrams in the cupboard, think the old methods were the best. The endorsement from this teacher speaks volumes:

Tags: Hyperstudio