Opera at SXSW 2008

This panel was my final one for the conference, and it was also the most technical. The panel chair—Patrick Sanchez, a systems administrator for Enspire Learning—began by outlining the technical features of the Wiimote. Those features, which I'm certain are familiar to most readers of this blog, are: a motion sensor, IR sensor, speaker, rumble, Bluetooth, and a few LEDs. While the device has a lot of functionality—panelist Chris Pittman of RFD pointed out that unlike the Xbox 360 or PS3, the Wii is completely open and hackable—there have not yet been many eLearning applications for the Wii. As an example of how easy it is to program the device, Pittman walked through a simple drawing app written in the Opera JavaScript API, and much of the discussion dealt with what applications might be possible with the Wiimote.

During the introductions, panelist Brandon Carson of Sun described why he got into eLearning. According to him, when he started at Sun their education apps were of two types. On one extreme, the user was completely passive, just viewing materials (like videos). On the other, the user merely clicked through "slide-junk." After some research, he found that most of what they were doing wasn't working because it wasn't tied to performance or business outcomes.

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