You have to be aware, but in practice you don't need to worry. People will use the tools they want to use. It's human nature and you're not going to change that. If the entry cost to use of a nice consistent environment is to retrain yourself to create your learning resources in html5 - and then re-purpose your existing materials - then my experience is that you won't go for it.

People have an irritating way of subverting systems that don't do what they want, and whether or not the purist approach is easier for people like us is quite beside the point. The point is that successful products (in my opinion) are going to be those that recognise the realities of how people work and accommodate those in their solutions. 

That is why, for example, I built Excel import into the Visual Vocabulary Tools. I found to my initial surprise that ordinary mortals preferred to use Excel to create hierarchical vocabulary structures to working in xml. I spent a lot of time early on in 1) "educating" my users into a better way and then 2) running xslt scripts to convert their Excel files into SKOS files, then importing those. Then I learned to live with how my users worked, and built the Excel import.

So in the case of different tools for using resources, I think the right way is graceful detection and alerting. The user will know that she's found the right piece of content (from the tagging) and can therefore store it for later or find it again when she is using the "right" tool.

Ian.

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Ian Piper

Tellura Information Services - the web, document and information people

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Author of "Learn Xcode Tools for Mac OS X and iPhone Development", Apress, December 2009

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