Hi Gregory,
Thanks for your interesting posting, and to everyone else who has contributed to this thread
I've been involved in developing educational media software for over 10 years, at a University here in NZ until a few years ago when I went out on my own. A lot of my early work was in the area of computer assisted learning, using HyperCard. Later I branched out into other academic disciplines, particularly medical teaching. I'm also convinced of the potential of applications like Revolution to contribute to meaningful, constructivist, student-centred online learning spaces.
Over the last two years I've been trying to put these ideas into practice in a commercial form. I've just released the results of this work, an application called OceanBrowser (PC/OSX) to my first customers. Developed in Revolution it combines a set of learning objects, a backend database on the internet for collaborative data, and a content management system for course data distributed on CD-ROM. It's designed to allow people to start out with what they have and feel comfortable with, and to gradually increase the interactivity/scope of learning activities as time and resources allow. It's important to the business model that the software is practical out of the box.
For those of you who are interested in the detail of the current product, here's a little more information. My initial customers are all involved in online postgraduate medical education. They have a well defined set of requirements, which include the ability to work with complex multimedia such as VR movies, audio, and large numbers of high resolution images. They also have a lot of documents that need distribution, typically Acrobat documents and Powerpoints. We converted the latter to Flash in order to more seamlessly display them in OceanBrowser. The product uses Altuit's excellent Altbrowser dll (on the Windows platform) to show web content. OceanBrowser supports a custom protocol ("ocb://") which allows academics to embed links in web pages or emails to point to specific learning resources in OceanBrowser. When the student clicks on this link, OceanBrowser will open, retrieve the resource (typically from a database stored on the local computer) and display. Next to every resource displayed in the system is a comments area that "tracks" the content being showed. Users can post comments to this area, which may also embed appropriate metadata (e.g. posting to an audio item includes link to the timepoint the user was at in the audio file, posting to Flash powerpoint links to slide). "Resource" can be anything ranging form a document (pdf, webpage), multimedia (image, movie) to an application (Flash player, Director projector, etc). The foregoing list may seem to be overly orientated around document distribution, as I said though, my users have a large body of existing content they need to work with, so stage one is to address these problems.
One of the more interesting learning objects in the system at the moment is an image annotation tool, which allows the user to view or create multimedia annotations to an image (by drawing a region on the image, recording an audio commentary, and providing additional information such as name, description etc). This has been based on some research I've been doing over the last year or so, and I hope to extend these annotation features to support true, distributed, collaborative image annotation.
With OceanBrowser I'm hoping that by creating a sustainable business model I'll be able to afford to invest the time into interaction design, prototyping, and research (review of educational literature/other products) that will be required to implement some of the more exciting educational ideas that I want to see in the product over time.
The new website for Oceanbrowser.com will be going up in a couple of weeks, now that the software product is complete. I hope then that we can put some demo content up for everyone to have a look at.
Regards,
Rodney
On 13/08/2004, at 9:14 AM, Gregory Lypny wrote:
You're most welcome, Judy.
In fact, I've opposed the development of online courses at Concordia, not only because the professor as communicator of his or her own research and art is removed from the equation (that online forums do not fill the gap is another story we could get into) and student interaction becomes marginal (it need not, but it does), but because web stuff is almost always more form than content and is generally not even developed by the educator. I haven't seen many online courses that are not fluff.
The potential benefits of standalone courseware, created with HyperCard-like languages, as complements to traditional lectures is, in my opinion, mind boggling. It would be trivial, for example, to create a Revolution stack that selects random excerpts of prose by authors who are considered to write in the same genre and present these to the student for comparison. But better still, have the professor use the stack in the class as a presentation vehicle so that he or she is also in the dark as to the prose that will be pulled up for comparison, and therefore would not benefit from the perfect foresight of dusty old critiques that otherwise could be used as a weapon of mass smugness (nasty, eh?). Make the profs earn their keep.
I have long stopped evangelizing courseware because the response I get from colleagues is that they do not want to be involved with its development. The incentive to do the work is simply not there. I make my stuff freely available to my colleagues, but their enthusiasm quickly peters when I explained that some work is required to get it to do what they want it to do. They'll only give it a spin if it's ready to go right off the shelf. But what is right off the shelf often wasn't developed with the direct and ongoing involvement of the educator and is unlikely to have the educational depth that it otherwise could. (In deference to everyone on this list, I'm not saying that you have to be an educator to create something educational. Quite the contrary: some of the fluffiest stuff I've seen was created by educators who don't have a particular speciality in any discipline. What I am saying is that courseware will be meatier if it is created by a scholar, which is someone who has a speciality and has produced original work in the sciences, humanities or art.) Of course, the dilemma faced by companies such as Runtime Revolution is that they can never make their software easy enough to use to appeal to a big enough market of individual educators because of the incentive problem. Some hope does lie with the many consultants and free-lance developers who have a scholarly bent, or have formed close collaborations with those who do. But I think that many of them would agree that the education market is not particularly lucrative, and we're back to where we started. I should leave this with a positive spin: courseware = cool, untapped potential. We just need more impressive examples of it in use.
Gregory
On Aug 12, 2004, at 2:57 PM, Judy Perry wrote:
Thanks, Gregory, for this insight.
I find it particularly interesting given that I just finished a master's
in instructional design & technology... in which the mantra seemed to be
"web uber alles". And, like you, I tended to disagree.
I think the problem with the web uber alles folks is that they do not possess the ability (much less the interest, I guess) of producing standalone interactive courseware. So what we get is alot of form trumping function.
A pity...
Judy
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-- Rodney Tamblyn 44 Melville Street Dunedin New Zealand +64 3 4778606 http://rodney.buzzword.com/ http://oceanbrowser.com
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