I have read your review of this product which, in its conclusion, sounds
like a sales talk for their marketing effort. It seems to me that it
would be appropriate to rectify some omissions by mentioning for instance
WebGen and producing a review of WebGen, a free product (which I personally
consider good too). This would provide more balance to your review.
I also consider Hot Potatoes an excellent tool (in terms of the range
and quality of its exercise types) and you downgrade it to "excellent
but inherently limited" which I found a strange comment. As far
as I am concerned, there is a division of opinion in the CAL(L) community
with respect to the virtues of Java and this perhaps should also be
mentioned since it means developers' approaches will differ.
Some of your assertions re Java also need to be mitigated against real
life experience. In our testing, we have found that Java plug-ins which
you have to download and install on even modern browsers do NOT always
work reliably across platforms, in particular the Mac.
Steve and Dominique have never suggested that their tool could be deployed
on the Mac and clearly at least one of their exercise protocols didn't
work when I tested the finished exercices (as a learner would) on their
web site, although 90% did, which is good news for Mac users. The deployment
reliability of Java applets is NOT 100% as you claim and if problems
occur they cannot easily be solved without recourse to a programmer.
It appears to be the case for instance that Java plug-ins won't work
on the MacOS below System 8.1 and many users still have a System version
no higher than 8.0 (the time equivalent of Windows 95). This means that
these exercises won't work on many legacy machines.
The last point to be made perhaps is that if we are to rival the power
of conventional computing on the web, we must have reliable mechanisms
for delivering multimedia based interactivity. This tool does nothing
on that front, it produces a mechanism for porting text-based exercises
to the web of the type which WIDA and Fun with Texts have done for more
than 20 years!
Thank you for taking the time to review this product, it is one of
few authoring systems for the web dedicated to language learning.
Philippe
http://www.disseminate.org.uk
I've read your review of this program and must admit I'm a bit surprized
at your "generosity".
Despite its "reasonable" price, I can't see how you can even
mention it in the same breath as any of the Macromedia products or Toolbook,
which offer a thousand times more flexibility. I can't see that it's
possible to intergrate sound or images with the exercises generated
by this program at all. In that regard, even Hot Potatoes is "more
powerful", despite the inherent limitations of Java Script when
compared to Java.
Furthermore, given the fact that the Jumbler exercise (as you mentioned)
doesn't seem to work - a fact corroborated by the online demo English
exercise(!) - really makes me wonder about the developers' concept of
quality control.
It seems like a real case of "not quite ready for prime time".
The way I see it, the development staff should have done a bit more
work - and thinking - before putting this one on the market.
Happy New Year.
Joe
Freelance English Teacher
http://go.to/eng4biotech
