Additionally, 23 projects developed at our institution were presented in booths during the duration of the two-day conference.
I think the most important project going on here is "Winfoline", developed by my colleague Prof. Winand. It can be called "important" as it has been accepted as a learning platform by a couple of other universities and because it get parts of the funding from our federal government.
You can look up information about it under
<http://winfoline.wirtschaft.uni-kassel.de> <http://www.winfoline.de>
This project also favors some "blended learning"; there are English parts of the websites.-
Although I sometimes cooperate very closely with Prof. Winand - having been jointly responsible for theses dealing with aspects of information sciences and educational technology and also conducting oral examinations - I have not yet been able to convince him of the benefits of XTalk languages.-
Our own booth presentation focused on our project "Language Suite" developed with Metacard, but offered samples of other educational materials. A short description of the "Language Suite" project is to be found - still in German - on page "Projects: Language Suite" of my website <http://www.sanke.org>, English version. The stacks themselves will be publicly available soon as demo versions.
The most frequently asked questions from participants of the conference at our booth was "Where is the browser?" and the feedback that apparently impressed them most was
- our indication that there was no need for a HTML browser, and
- demonstrating the ability of Metacard/Revolution to start programs online without browser assistance and being connected to five different websites simultaneously (RevNet, California; Metacard-Site, Colorado; Himalayan Academy, Hawaii; Tactile Media, California; FTP-Server Uni Kassel, Germany).
We also tried to convince them of the higher degree of "interactivity" possible with XTalk languages as compared to browser-based languages.
I addressed such questions some years ago in an article about
"Interaktives Lernen im Internet? -
Fragen zum Design und zur m�glichen Nutzung von Lernmaterialien �ber das "World Wide Web", 1997,
which at some points raises issues similar to those in Richard Gaskin's "Beyond the Browser". The German version of my article is available on page "Texte", website <http://www.sanke.org>, German version.-
Interestingly, one of the other booth presentations was about about a project originally developed with Metacard ("Simulation Handelsvorteile", page "Student Samples" of my website), but re-programmed with Flash. The student had developed this simulation using Metacard in a few days. He attracted the attention of a colleague from "Computational Mathematics" who however persuaded him to re-program it with Flash as a "real" programming tool by offering him a one-year and well-paid contract as a research assistant. It took the student two months - so he told me - to achieve with Flash (he had to learn Flash from scratch) what he alrady had achieved using Metacard; the results of his efforts look very much identical, the biggest difference being that resizing - and adapting the simulation to screen size - is much easier in Flash than with Revolution/Metacard.
-- Wilhelm Sanke, Prof. University Media Center University of Kassel, Germany <http://www.sanke.org>
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