NMIS Project Final Report 1993 - 1997

2.1 K-12 Education Information Services

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Introduction

Multimedia information services for the K-12 community promise exciting opportunities for enhanced learning. The value of traditional, high quality educational programs can be extended by using computer-based tools for archiving, access, viewing, presentation, and repurposing by teachers and students. An example of such a program is CNN Newsroom, a highly acclaimed, 30 minute-per-day, commercial free, video news program developed by Turner Educational Services, Inc. (TESI), a division of Turner Broadcasting.

Accomplishments

CAES and CECI of MIT worked as a team in cooperation with TESI to develop and deliver INTERNET CNN Newsroom, a daily multimedia news magazine and library available to the K-12 community on the Internet via the World Wide Web (WWW) [7]. The Internet version of CNN Newsroom has been created by digitizing the traditional version of the program. The traditional program is broadcast via satellite each morning and distributed by cable television operators nationwide who broadcast it to schools where it is videotaped. It is targeted at primary and secondary school classrooms as part of cable television's "Cable in the Classroom," and is used in almost 30,000 schools. CNN Newsroom's composition changes daily, but it generally consists of 8-14 segments of 1-5 minutes each.

This project has resulted in the stable delivery of a high quality multimedia magazine, as well as one of the largest archives of high quality multimedia materials for curriculum creation and research available on the Internet. The use of the service has been widespread, and the general reactions from users have been positive. It serves as a useful educational tool for schools and provides a unique resource for researchers. This has been supported through the collection of HTTP server statistics which were made publicly accessible on the World Wide Web (WWW) in both numerical and graphical format. These statistics demonstrate that the site has been regularly used by a number of schools in the U.S. for the expected use as a social studies resource. In addition, server statistics and email indicate that the site is also widely used in both U.S. and foreign schools as a tool in English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction. For example, one school district made special arrangements with NMIS and TES to maintain a large local cache for secondary schools and high schools in Turku, Finland.

The most popular use of the site has been to access the daily CNN Newsroom Guide (1000 hits per day). The popularity of the electronic version of the guide helped to motivate TES to also offer the guide on their own server. Another popular use has been to download the transcripts generated from the closed captioning instead of the video files. This allows many classrooms to have access to the content of the video segments without needing the bandwidth or memory to use the MPEG video segments.

Finally, the most notable use of the site was access to both the video magazine and archive. It is important to note that Internet CNN Newsroom did not receive deliberate public promotion because of the limitation of 24 connections at a time imposed by MIT's connection to the Internet. This limitation was even more significant when combined with the added restriction of the connection time required to download each complete video file. Despite this highly restricted access, the use of the video on the site received relatively heavy and consistent usage. Over the course of the project, there were consistently more than 100 downloads of the entire video magazine within the 48 hours following publication. In addition, each individual story received from 100 to 200 additional hits. Finally, the video archive consistently received 300-500 queries per day. These statistics clearly reflect artificial limitations to access, and will be quickly dwarfed as NMIS implements new technical capabilities, expands the number of connections supported, and deliberately expands utilization.

The MIT Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development (MIT/CTPID) later used the INTERNET CNN Newsroom's implementation set up by CAES within a selected high school social studies classroom in Lexington, MA to examine the benefits and costs of multimedia information services distributed over the Internet.

The first of these efforts developed five technology models with increasing levels of connectivity. For each model, a range of one-time and annual costs were computed. The data indicated that the cost of network hardware would be only a small fraction of the overall networking costs, while support of the network would be the largest ongoing annual cost facing schools. Beyond exploring the basic implementation issues, this study also documented a fundamental shift in students' opinion of a computer's purpose from typing and gaming to information retrieval and communication [23].

A second study found that, as expected, the key educational benefit that INTERNET CNN Newsroom has offered over the conventional program is ease of clip location, assembly, and reuse through insertion in derivative works. It is much easier for teachers and students to locate content to match the daily curriculum objectives through searching the archive to find and access relevant stories at need. The study also found that successes in implementing technology in the classroom depended on the flexibility of the technology in allowing partial and incremental implementation, and required active adaptation by students and teachers. [22]

Future Directions

The greatest barrier to teachers' and students' use of INTERNET CNN Newsroom has been a lack of training and support. This impediment highlights the need for school funding of human infrastructure in addition to network infrastructure. Future efforts to develop and deliver networked multimedia information services may improve their chances for success by placing as much emphasis on the development of support as on the development of technologies. Since using technology in the classroom depended on the flexibility of the technology in allowing partial and incremental implementation, careful consideration should be given to ways that tools and services can be designed to accommodate a variety of uses. This would allow them to better support a gradual evolution away from immediate and familiar uses towards an expanding set of new uses as they are recognized.


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