4.1.3 Multimedia
A third frequently encountered set of issues for the projects studied was how to
represent the multimodal nature of their content for Multimodal Representation
(Visual, Auditory and Other Senses). Authors sought to do this by taking advantage
of the current convergence of media to employ digitized multimedia formats.
For example, throughout the ESCAPE project,
one frequently stated goal was
to make the software more interesting and engaging through the use of digitized sound,
color graphics, and short video clips about career-planning and engineering design.
However, due to technical difficulties, the actual achievement of these goals has
been limited to a database of black and white graphs, a series of 12 color pictures
and a few sound clips.
A greater degree of success surrounding visual representation was found in
Context32.
The Intermedia tools were designed to provide support for visualization in learning
(Yankelovich, Meyrowitz & VanDam, 1985;
Kahn, Launhardt, Lenk & Peters, 1990).
Anything that could be typed in a text document or drawn in a graphics document
could be linked to anything else on the Intermedia system, so Landow
was able to utilize this capability to provide an interesting visual experience for students.
Many of the graphic documents were scanned images of art works, architecture,
portraits. In addition, graphics capabilities were also critical to support
the creation of visual maps that were used to support students navigation in the system.
Neither TODOR nor Mechanics 2.01
specifically included digitized multimedia. But while their software did not support
the importation of graphics and other multimedia, they did base their preference of
the computational medium upon its ability to represent their discipline in
a computationally generated graphics format.
The PGT project considered multimodal representations
of their discipline, and successfully attained those goals through the power of the
AthenaMuse software. The AthenaMuse format allows one to show on a small scale all
pictures associated with the text and to have any of them shown on a larger scale by
"clicking" it with the mouse.