NMC Announces Launch of Pachyderm Services
Today the New Media Consortium (NMC) announced the launch of Pachyderm Services, a new suite of services which will provide colleges and universities, museums, schools and other learning-focused organizations a new suite of services supporting low-cost web-based multimedia authoring.
The program offers two categories of services — hosted accounts for teachers, students, museum professionals and other individuals; and hosted server solutions for institutions and departments. The new unit will provide a variety of ways for individuals and institutions to have hosted Pachyderm authoring accounts on a yearly subscription basis designed to match any budget.
“Pachyderm combines interactive multimedia, digital storytelling, and clean, simple design in a way that lets authors focus on the content they want to share,” notes Rachel Smith, Vice President of NMC Services and Pachyderm Project Director. “Photos and video can be recorded with a basic digital camera, edited with free or low-cost tools, and placed into Pachyderm quickly and easily. This really is a tool for people who don’t have access to expensive equipment and software.”
Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author's website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.
“Pachyderm is perfect for students, from grade school through college,” according to Kris Wetterlund of Sandbox Studios. “We have seen museums create kid-friendly pieces that blend art from their collections with classroom concepts in history, literature, mathematics, and science. Putting Pachyderm in the hands of the kids themselves is going to be a powerful way to let them express themselves and really work with the content they are learning,” she adds. “I can’t wait to see what they do with it.”
Edutopia, the online magazine of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, described Pachyderm as “multimedia authoring for peanuts” (“The Elephant in the (Class)room: Pachyderm’s Multimedia Tool,” Edutopia, August 29, 2007). Basic subscription accounts are available for $99 per year; premium accounts, which include unlimited Help Desk access, are $149 per year. No special software is required to author in Pachyderm—the service runs entirely in a web browser.
Dr. Larry Johnson, NMC’s CEO, notes, “The aim of Pachyderm Services is to provide options to schools and museums, especially the smaller locations that simply don’t have the technical staff to support an installation of their own. With Pachyderm Services, museums and schools don’t need to install a thing to be able to support multimedia authoring for the web—no servers to maintain, no need to train technical support staff—it’s all done for you.” Johnson also notes that organizations requiring large numbers of accounts can save money by leasing a dedicated Pachyderm server for as little as $5 per account per year.
Hosted Pachyderm accounts and server solutions are available immediately. For further information or to request an account, please visit pachyderm.nmc.org.
