In 2009 I got the opportunity to spend a week at Adobe HQ as part of a Summer Institute for Adobe Education Leaders from around the world. It was a real honour to have been appointed the first Adobe Higher Education Leader in New Zealand and to be invited to their Summer Institute in San Jose. It was a fantastic week and a great opportunity to meet a lot of exceptionally talented people...both within Adobe and from the Adobe Education Leaders community. We were exceptionally well looked after and got to learn a lot about forthcoming releases from Adobe, as well as it being an opportunity for Adobe to listen to us about suggestions for future projects and how to support the education sector worldwide.

I did however come away with two frustrations - Firstly, I felt that Adobe didn't really appreciate the significance of the Moodle open source Learning Management System in the education sector, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region¹. With the greatest respect to Adobe, I would say that I still don't think they have fully understood its importance within the e-Learning community. Secondly, at the end of a presentation and discussion about the next version of Adobe Connect, we moved on to a discussion about Adobe Captivate...and in particular, how many in the room felt that there was a need for a simplified version of Adobe Captivate...an "Adobe Captivate Lite" if you will, or as I outline here, a suggested Adobe Captivate Elements.

The reason I say this is that I believe that there is still the need for such an application and my reasoning stays much the same as it was in 2009. I shared some of that reasoning with the two Adobe staff immediately after the discussion had taken place at Adobe HQ and it goes along the lines of this....Adobe Captivate was (and is) a very powerful application that has tremendous use in the eLearning community. But it is an application that I don't often recommend depending upon the needs of the people that I am talking to. In many case, I recommend alternatives, despite Captivate being an absolutely superb product².

The introduction and adoption of the Adobe Connect and Adobe Presenter technologies into Massey University is something I am exceptionally proud of achieving.

The work that I did at Massey University bringing the Adobe Connect web-conferencing system into the University and how we were using it was featured as an Adobe Case Study on their website. I asked Dr Craig Prichard to be involved in the case study also. It was an interesting experiences even just getting the document written up (in terms of the various people we had to deal with) and it's been great to see a link to this case study feature in a few of Adobe's printed brochures.

Adobe kindly invited me to be a presenter at the Adobe Education Leadership Forum in Kuala Lumpur, April 2008.

By the time I started in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, WebCT (the University's Learning Management System at the time) had been in use in the University for a number of years. Surprisingly no-one had ever written online support material for staff on how to use WebCT. As part of my role as an E-Learning Facilitator, I developed and maintained an e-learning website to support staff. The site featured support for WebCT , Adobe Connect (formerly known as Macromedia Breeze - a flash-based presentation and virtual conferencing system) as well as information on other technologies and their use in e-learning.

In 2005 I wrote an article for the Journal Of Distance Learning entitled Learning Management Systems and the Realities of Using Open Source Software*. I wasn't very happy with the fact that the article was published with edits that hadn't been discussed with me, such as paragraphs being moved and words changed (such as "software's lifecycle" being changed to "software's lifestyle"...yikes!).