“Welcome to your new careers. If you can’t deal with this sort of change on a regular basis … there’s the door. Go get a refund and go drive a beer truck.” < Amazing advice to students from Tom GreenTom Green originally shared this post:Once more in public:

The news that Adobe is killing Flash Player Mobile and adding an HTML 5 output capability to Flash has been greeted with the usual outrage , screaming and yelling. For me, as a teacher, it means rethinking a few courses I teach and learning a few new skills which is sort of my job anyway. Comes with the turf… so to speak. 

What surprises me is many of the people reacting negatively to this “move” should have seen it coming. It is not like it was any great secret sprung upon an unsuspecting community. It was quietly gathering steam when Steve delivered his message from on high and his pronouncement just brought it into clearer focus and started a rather messy and public debate. 

I saw the debate as useful because, as a teacher, I couldn’t rationalize teaching my students multiple approaches, players and platforms to essentially do the same thing: get something running on a device. In fact my Adobe Education Leader colleagues still rib me about my response to being asked about mobile and teaching when asked about it at Adobe HQ a couple of years ago. My response? “I would rather drive chopsticks into my eyeballs.” 

My first clue that something was up with Flash was the introduction of Wallaby. Here was an app on Labs that converted a Flash timeline animation to HTML 5 code. Many of the Flash guys I talked to about it regarded it as some sort of wind-up toy. That struck me as rather odd because Wallaby was a path into the HTML 5 universe for Flash. In fact, Wallaby seems to have become the engine for the new HTML export feature of Flash CS6 and Flash can be now used as an animation technology for HTML 5. This is a bad thing? 

How can ubiquity- the ability to reliably play across multiple platforms, screens and devices – be seen as a negative? As many of you know I have been working with Edge for most of this year and am becoming a rather strong supporter of this app. I just like it and one of the first things I learned when I got to play with it was my Flash skills were easily transferable to Edge animation and projects. In fact one of the first things I did was run a simple Flash animation through Wallaby and then play with it in Edge.It was rather neat and showed me there was straight line from Flash to the HTML5 universe. I am also exploring how that line passes through apps such as Fireworks, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and others and exploring and researching where they fit into the process and where what I teach fits as well. 

As a teacher, I don’t see any of this as a threat. It just means I am going to have to start developing a new skill set … something I do every couple of years anyway. It also means I am going to have to revisit my courses, now, and ask: Do the Learning Outcomes and Objectives match the skill set required of our grads when they graduate? Based on what is going on, obviously not but I have a good 10 months to think this through and rejig what is being taught in my classes. 

Of course walking into this whole mess in today’s Flash class was a treat. The first thing I saw was a student holding up his iPhone and showing me a “Flash is dead” Tweet as I was going through the door. “So why are we here?”, he asks. 

I waited for all of the students to get settled and it was an eerie experience. The room was silent and the students just stared at me .“Why the f@#k are we taking this Flash course if Flash is dead” was sort of the question being beamed at me. It was not what I was expecting. 

Rather than become an Adobe apologist – which they sort of expected – I told them . “Welcome to your new careers. If you can’t deal with this sort of change on a regular basis … there’s the door. Go get a refund and go drive a beer truck.” It was a great opportunity for me to review all that had been going on, what happened,and what it means for them. 

The thrust was technology changes and you either embrace change or get out of the way. Change is a fact of life in our business and, as a teacher, it is a fact of life for me. 

I explained how we, as a faculty group, are constantly changing the program to keep skill levels and knowledge current with the market but our job was not easy because not only do we have to plan for this crew’s graduation but for the one coming in next September. I knew they were starting to get it when I explained to them that attempting to teach mobile in a short time frame with such turmoil around platforms and so on would be doing them a disservice. Instead, I made it quite clear that Adobe’s decision to embrace HTML 5 now made our teaching path clearer in the mobile space because there now is a common denominator, regardless of platform. 

Whether or not I agree with Adobe is irrelevant. I have no influence over their policies and decisions. Who they kept and who they let go is their call. Though I think they made a few bone-headed decisions around the layoffs the plain fact of the matter is … these people are still laid off and getting on with their lives. A few of them were my friends and they know that I will support them in their next endeavors. 

Which is sort of where I left it with my students. They can worry about change or simply ask, “ Here’s what happened. How do I adapt?” The key is how we each answer that question.