Multimedia Education

It is my vision is that, well within the lifetimes of today's students, it will be commonplace for almost all educated people to create multimedia, as well as use multimedia information that others prepare. This multimedia will either be for standalone play back as in a CD on a PC or for distribution over the Web. The advantages of learning or acquiring information for knowledge or entertainment by employing multiple sensory modalities hardly need restating. However, it is important to emphasize the advantages of actively creating multimedia, in addition to passively using others' creations.

This means that student- prepared book reports become multimedia book reports; lab reports include video observations and audio annotation; and the traditionally written Spanish homework becomes not just text, but also includes audio, graphics, and even video. It means that business people routinely add media to their memos, E-mail, and reports. Creating and making effective use of multimedia will substantially enrich peoples' personal lives, not just school lives and business lives. Few can doubt the enjoyment that multimedia E-mail delivers to Grandparents that live remotely to their grandchildren. Many of today's students will work actively in some capacity with interactive, digital information, in jobs that promise excitement similar to the present excitement.

How do we move toward this direction? The objective of this site is to pull together the best of the Web sites, to report on information relating to multimedia education, and to discuss issues among ourselves that can be helpful in providing education on multimedia. Together, we will be working toward answering questions such as the following:

· What will be the main impacts of multimedia (interacting with text, graphics, images, audio, and video) on students, professionals, and cultures?

· How can you quickly gain some technical competence in using and creating multimedia, so you can begin to accumulate valid experiences?

· What framework helps us to understand the effects of multimedia, now and in the next decade?

· How can you approach multimedia with the right expectations?

· What are suitable road maps and time tables?

· Where should you start selecting among many choices for hardware and software, all of which tend to be somewhat hard to use?

· How can you be more creative yourself?

· How can you foster multimedia creativity in others?

· What is the state of the art in multimedia hardware?

· Do you need to keep up with a new generation every six months?

· What will major challenges and opportunities be over the next several

· How can we divide software up into layers, in order to understand alternatives , incompatibilities, and hodge podges of acronyms?

· What software could give you good long-term return on your investments of time and dollars?

· What are useful evaluation criteria for applications?

· What organizations and styles of applications exist and how do you select and use them to achieve specific desired results?

· How do the four generations of applications differ in appearance and use?

· What techniques should you learn for using and creating applications for various cultures?

· How can you develop applications yourself?

· What authoring system and platform will you use to create your class project and what will your topic be?

· How can you best review others' research, and perform your own research, on subjects relating

to multimedia education?

· Where is the market for multimedia applications now and where is it going?

· Who are the key suppliers of applications?

· What are the impediments to profitable, effective multimedia creation?

· What are useful approaches to making money and managing authoring teams as they plan, develop, test, ship, and market applications?

· What tradeoffs are required and how do you make them?

· What skills are required now and in the future?

· Why is reusable content so important?

· How do you handle the legalities and ethics of copyrights and credits?

We will explore possible answers to these questions, with your help, with weekly reports and updates.