Sivakatirswami wrote:
Au contraire... , I already have a number of titles, for free, on the
internet. If you look at access logs, I see a lot of traffic to these
pages, but not a lot of downloads.
http://himalayanacademy.com/resources/children/dws_youth/
http://himalayanacademy.com/resources/children/yamas_niyamas/
(I think if you try these you will have to agree I'm not into super
technology... the one complaint being they lack sound...)
Meanwhile:
PDF's here:
http://himalayanacademy.com/resources/children/SaivaHR_course/
on the other hand are downloaded at the rate of 2000-3000 a month
consistently year after year.
There may be other factors at play with these download rates than just
the formats.
For example, on the download page for the apps you have a form, but
there is no form on the page with the PDF links. If you read the app
page carefully you'll understand that the download doesn't actually
require the user to fill in the form, but for someone in a hurry (read,
"Most folks in the 'net" <g>) that may not be clear. In contrast, the
links to the PDFs occur on a page with no form at all, just a simple
inviting link. So just moving the form to a separate page and making
the free download more readily understood as a one-click operation may
boost downloads there significantly.
But also, the nature of the apps is more about reading than doing. The
"doing" in those apps is limited pretty much to navigation, with the
core content being primarily textual (though there are some very nice
supporting graphics and animations). The text is the real value to
those apps (very good reminders for all of us about "right
mindfullness"; I really enjoyed reading them), but being textual they
lend themselves equally well to being in a PDF or even in HTML.
On the other extreme we have apps like Dynamic Digital Maps and Reactor Lab:
<http://ddm.geo.umass.edu/>
<http://reactorlab.net/>
These apps are richly dependent on "doing", with any textual elements
merely supporting the intensely interactive nature of these apps.
Both of these were made with Rev, and both have an educational focus but
each would be very difficult to build as web pages. And IIRC they also
provide offline modes, which are generally not supported with purely
browser-based apps (no control over local file I/O).
So when comparing adoption rates of apps to documents like PDF, I
believe there's a lot more going on than just the format.
Like McLuhan told us, "The medium is the message":
In deliver educational materials, it adds value to deliver it in an
application to the degree that the material is dependent on interaction.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
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