On-Line Educational Multimedia Authoring Environments the European School Network

Paper to be Presented inEuropean Multimedia, Microprocessor Systems and ElectronicCommerce Conference and ExhibitionStockholm, Sweden21-23 June 1999 On-Line Educational Multimedia Authoring Environments: the European SchoolNetwork Virtual LaboratoryDemetrios G. SAMPSON1, Eva WIGFORSS2 and Aysegul CUHADAR3 1Pliroforiki Technognosia Ltd, 11B Konitsis Str, Maroussi, Athens GR-15125, GREECETelephone:+30-1-6125880; Fax:+30-1-6125882; Email: sampson@ath.forthnet.gr2University of Lund, Center for Information Technology in University Education, S 221 85, SWEDEN Telephone:+46-46-172775; Fax:+46-46-171732; Email:eva.wigforss@logopedi.lu.se3University of Manitoba, Room 562 Engineering Building, 15 Gillson St., Winnipeg,Manitoba, R3T 5V6 CANADA Telephone: +1-204-4749085; Fax : +1-204-2614639; Email:cuhadara@cc.umanitoba.canAbstract. In this paper, we present the work in progress towards thedesign and development of the Virtual Educational MultimediaAuthoring Laboratory (VEMA) within the framework of the EuropeanSchoolNet (EUN) initiative which is supported by the European Union’sMinistries of Education and the European Commission (under theEducational Multimedia Task Force MM1010 Contract).1. IntroductionThe European SchoolNet (EUN) initiative [1] has been initiated and designed to respond to the concerns and the priorities reflected by the European Commission’s Action Plan “Learning in the Information Society” [2] aiming to contribute to the implementation of this Plan. It was initiated by an official proposal made by the Swedish Ministry of Education to its fellow EU members concerning a joint initiative to set up a European SchoolNet in co-operation with the European Commission [3].The European SchoolNet (EUN)comprises national and other school computer networks. It has three main aims: to facilitate co-operation between schools in Europe, to offer a range of educational content or teaching services, and to provide opportunities for teachers to develop their skills. EUN is an Internet-based network of information and services made available free of charge to schools, teachers, pupils and the public. Besides the 15 EU member states, the EUN includes Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.The objective of the European SchoolNet (EUN) is to promote the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) among schools in Europe, in particular by•fostering and supporting collaboration and cooperation among schools in Europe •making available to schools in Europe pedagogical and information services with a European added value•supporting the professional development of teachers by means of ICT and foremost the Internet.The European SchoolNet () shall also act as a framework among its partners for the development of the use of ICT in schools and for identifying good practice in this respect. Issues relating to the “educational content production” specifically concerned with Educational Publishing on the Internet, are recognised to be very important. The EUN must examine how pupils themselves are "contributors" of material and not just "consumers" of professionally published texts and multimedia resources from third parties. User-friendly software tools should allow pupils to create their own resources and not just explore those developed elsewhere. As a result, EUN work package 15 (The Virtual Educational MultimediaAuthoring Laboratory-VEMA) was set up to investigate issues related with the selection, evaluation and provision of user-friendly and pedagogically sound hypermedia and multimedia educational authoring environments to be integrated in the EUN platform.2. Background and the Main Objectives of the EUN-VEMA ProjectThe demand for innovative educational multimedia software has never been greater. European Schools require advanced multimedia authoring environments which allow both teachers and pupils (primary and secondary) to create a new generation of resources to enhance children’s educational and play experiences. Currently, however, it is still the case that, when teachers first acquire multimedia authoring tools, they are uncertain of how best to exploit them in the classroom. They appreciate that these tools can offer a powerful way to explore diverse topics, but they are unsure where to begin with these tools. In many cases the written support materials that accompany the majority of authoring tools include only simple ‘How To’ guides via menus and buttons, rather than pedagogical guidelines or a discussion of how this technology could be fully integrated into the learning environment [4].The main scope of the EUN-VEMA project is to make available to the European SchoolNet a complete toolbox of state-of-the-art educational hypermedia and multimedia authoring environments, together with appropriate training material and best practice examples taken from real school life. In this way, it will be possible for teachers and pupils to use the networked computers in their classroom both as an interactive textbook and an expressive medium, while, at the same time, they will have the ability to create and explore their own new learning paths.The key objectives of the project are [5]:•to investigate state-of-the-art educational hypermedia and multimedia authoring environments (commercial or developed within the framework of collaborative European R&D projects), identify the requirements of teachers and learners (taking into consideration different learning paradigms and school curricula), and devise a number of criteria to evaluate their pedagogical value.•to design, implement and validate a Web Site for the Virtual Educational Multimedia Authoring (VEMA) Laboratory, where a number of hypermedia and multimedia authoring environments will be offered together with appropriate technical and pedagogical guidelines for their use and a set of best practice examples produced from real school life activities;•to produce teachers training material for the use of each of the suggested educational authoring environments covering technical, methodological and pedagogical issues relating to their use for classroom activities. The production of the training material is an important factor for the effective exploitation of the multimedia authoring environments by the users, as it will not only explain their capabilities, but will also provide users with additional support in choosing the most suitable tools for their particular needs;•to identify “success stories” from the use of these environments in real school life and provide a set of best practice examples produced by teachers and students of the EUN School Network. This is closely interrelated to the above objectives, as the examples will: serve as a point of reference for teachers and pupils in their attempts to create their own educational multimedia applications; stimulate innovation among users; and provide ideas and motivation for the utilisation of the tools.3. State-of-the-Art of Educational Multimedia Authoring EnvironmentsThe introduction of new information technologies in schools is expected to radically change existing teaching methods. In particular, these technologies offer adequate support for a paradigm shift from Instructionism to Constructionism [4]. By using computers within the curriculum in radically new ways, students are no longer passive recipients of transmitted ‘knowledge’ but can now actively participate in the creation of a learning experience. Increasingly, there is the recognition that ‘authoring is learning’.EUN-VEMA’s starting point is that, at some point, pupils should start to reflect - construct new realities - and in the Piagetian sense ‘accommodate information’. The child should be free to choose his own information and build his own cognitive principles about the organisation of that information. The learning process should also not be simply about transmitting facts butshould help children develop skills on how to collect their information themselves, evaluate it and organise it into their own schemas and categories [6].Partners in EUN-VEMA Project suggest that 'authoring' educational multimedia should provide students with an opportunity to create this organisation themselves either by producing multimedia applications individually or by contributing to multimedia presentation/programmes produced by industry or teachers in a more constructivist way. Existing authoring environments makes this increasing possible by providing user-friendly and relatively inexpensive tools. But innovative use of these tools still requires teachers to adopt a new learning/teaching philosophy. The four suggested levels of the use of educational multimedia below intend to mirror a possible development for the pedagogical value of educational multimedia.Several projects directed at enhancing the quality of computer-supported education have been implemented so far. The most notable is probably the Instructional Software Design Project (ISDP) initiated by S. Papert and I. Harel to study young students’ developing learning processes as they develop complete software packages, or use such packages developed by other children. Educational tools used for this purpose are mainly Logo based (such as LogoWriter, Lego-Logo, Emile, WinLogo, PC Logo, StarLogo, Comenius Logo etc.), while others are complete programming environments (such as KidSim, Microworlds, Boxer, Digital Playground etc.).Today there are a variety of commercial hypermedia and multimedia authoring environments ranging from simple resource packages to full-blown professional scripting software. Multimedia resources, such as Apple Computer’s Visual Almanac, offer examples of media (e.g., video, sound, graphics, or animation) that the user may want to use in creating their own multimedia experiences. Another category of authoring tools creates multimedia presentations; tools such as Broderbund’s Kid Pix Studio allow users to develop their own video or slide show presentations. Other tools, such as Roger Wagner’s HyperStudio, enables the user to create interactive multimedia. Applications with a greater degree of flexibility are professional multimedia authoring tools, such as Macromedia Director and Apple Media Tool (by Apple Computer Inc.); these offer powerful metaphors for how students’ learning environments might look in the future.More recently, authoring tools such as SK8(by Apple Computer Inc, ) [7] have been designed to support the construction of subject-matter specific representations. Other subject-matter specific tools such as Geometer’s Sketchpad and SimCalc MathWorlds allow authoring through simple drag-and-drop construction [8].In addition, online environments offer students and teachers the ability to share ideas and information with vast numbers of people. There are a number of interesting results in this area from EU-funded collaborative R&D projects. For example, the OSCAR Project [9], carried out within the CEC DELTA Programme - III Framework Programme - resulted in an open system architecture supporting collaborative and distributed authoring of multimedia educational software. The OSCAR architecture included multimedia communication facilities, a repository of multimedia objects, and co-authoring services for joint multimedia educational software design and production, as well as co-ordination, collaboration, co-decision and re-use. The OSCAR "co-authoring services" were devised to support interaction of more than one person, sharing of components from one part of a course to another, multimedia project management and parallel development of different parts of a course with the assurance that they will work together in the end.Finally, only last year, a large number of digital worlds were established on the Internet, together with numerous online multi-user gaming environments. Examples are WorldsChat and AlphaWorld (Worlds Inc), WorldsAway (CompuServe), V-Chat (Microsoft), The Palace (Time-Warner Interactive), Moondo (Intel) and many more. Access to these worlds is easy, requiring only an Internet connection and a relatively fast computer. They have attracted large numbers of users (who are now called inhabitants of the world) and has this has led to the virtual planning and execution of actual social events.4.Evaluation Methodology : the Four-Stage ModelIt is important that the EUN-VEMA project considers a wide variety of the authoring environments currently available and examines how individual packages are best suited to arange of criteria such as: the age of the users; pedagogical approaches and developmental schemas; cultural aspects; curriculum needs; computer literacy of the users; hardware platforms; usability and/or programmability of the authoring environment.Pupil's authoring environments for example, should be easy to interact with and should provide a “playable” interface which will encourage children to develop their own applications through examples (templates to build upon, wizards) and simple actions. Authoring environments aimed at teachers should be user-friendly, powerful and comprehensive environments, and should allow the non-experienced user (the teacher is neither a programmer, nor a professional developer) to create, update and extend his own work. Other ways of classifying multimedia authoring environments could be related to their unique strengths and pedagogical features which foster different aspects of the educational process (e.g. differences in the underlying philosophy of teaching, in content, in the educational level of users addressed, etc.).To evaluate the role of educational multimedia in schools the EUN-VEMA project will analyse a variety of existing empirical studies to discover the cognitive as well as the emotional impact on students, pupils and teachers in new learning environments. A four stage model, initially constructed by the "IT for quality" project leaders, Karl-Axel Nilsson and Bo Müller [10], will be adopted to evaluate the use of educational authoring enviroments in the classroom. Through questionnaires and interviews partners will be able to classify and illuminate how both teachers and students learn as a result of using educational multimedia software.4.1 The Four Stage Model Evaluation Method1.Teachers and students know how to use a computer and multimedia material but there areno discernible pedagogical aims. This level is a baseline to separate those that have not yet been in contact with a computer and digitised multimedia material from those that actually can operate computers and programmes.2.Teachers and students/pupils using the computer (multimedia resources) in a pedagogicalway where they just have to change media for information seeking/organisation or production i.e. reading or creating a book through HyperStudio, KidPix etc. The added value is the possibility for the educational multimedia (through its authoring tools) to compile various media in one place i.e. listen to bird song, looking at the birds’ colour and reading about it, all in the same page and with various degrees of interactivity. This level can be perceived in several schools today, although we feel there is a risk that this level could be the sole aim for many teachers; consequently, in the long run it could be questionable if the media is an appropriate learning tool. The use of technical equipment (hardware and software) could ultimately complicate the use of the media instead. It is far easier to pick upa book than start a computer and run a program. The added information value really has tobe outstanding for the teacher/student to overcome these difficulties.3.On this level we will be able to classify all those projects where teachers/students are usingcomputers/educational multimedia with the aim of learning new things that could not be taught or learned other than by using multimedia. This level is a paradigmatical shift from level 2 and will not be reached without new cognitive/pedagogical insights. We suspect that some authoring tools can produce this effect by forcing the teacher/student to look/present material or learning goals in a different way i.e. through the authoring process pupils see things in a new light. This level is the goal of the EUN-VEMA Project in order to justify the use of IT and educational multimedia in schools.4.This level to some extent overlaps with 3 but represents highly innovative uses ofmultimedia by pupils and teachers who are virtually ‘artists’ and whose use/production of educational multimedia is truly leading-edge. This would, for example, be the equivalent of SimCity in an educational multimedia environment. Use of educational multimedia at this level is rare but examples can currently be found in a variety of school settings.T his classification in four levels can either be done by external evaluation of the actual educational multimedia authoring environments and/or by the evaluation from the user group (pupils etc.). We will chose both methods. In the Swedish project "IT for Quality in Schools" the primary aim was just to reach level 1 for all K-12 schools included in the project (a total number of 90). But other aims also included stimulating and encouraging teachers at level 3 through project funding. The outcome of this stimulation will be investigated by the EUN-VEMA using questionnaires, in-depth interviews and on-spot evaluation by other partners in the project.T he investigation of the production and use of educational multimedia through mere evaluation of the product and its use in various settings is one way to attempt to understand the pedagogical value of multimedia in schools. Another method is to ask the producer (teacher, student/pupil; commercial organisations) about the supposed learning outcome of the product -that is, to identify the intended goal and goal that was actually achieved. This is necessary because it is clear that some authoring tools impose constraints on users because of their lack of functionality.5.ConclusionsIn this paper, we present the work in progress towards the design and development of the Virtual Educational Multimedia Authoring Laboratory (VEMA) within the framework of the European SchoolNet (EUN) initiative which is supported by the European Union’s Ministries of Education and the European Commission (under the Educational Multimedia Task Force MM1010 Contract). After a short introduction to the history and the main objectives of the EUN Initiative, the authors described the background of the EUN-VEMA project emphasising on the state-of-the-art educational hypermedia and multimedia authoring environments. Finally, a methodology based on a four-stage model is described for the evaluation of the use of educational authoring tools in schools.The very obvious trend today for educational purposes is to use multimedia and hypermedia authoring tools for web publications, see Spohrer & Sumner & Buckingham-Shum (1998). However CD ROM publications are also a coming media especially since the hardware gets less and less expensive. The pedagogical problems to be solved or enlightened by educational multimedia will always be the main target for the teacher and pupil, and the choice of an actual tool will be an effect of the problem to be solved. However, we also argue that the choice of educational multimedia will affect the problem-solving and even the learning outcome As part of the EUN project, a group of teachers and students will be invited to evaluate a number of commercial and research products, along the following three main categories of educational authoring environments.AcknowledgementsThis work is partly financially supported by the European Commission (DG XXII and XIII) under the Educational Multimedia Task Force MM1010 Contract.References[1] Ulf Lundin, The European SchoolNet (EUN)–A Project in Being, European Education Magazine Context, 19,(1997)[2] European Commission, Learning in the Information Society – Action Plan for a European Education Initiative, http://www.ispo.cec.be/infosoc/educ/learn.html[3]Ylva Johansson, Towards A European SchoolNet, Interium Report presented to the informal Education Council in Amsterdam, March 1997[4] Allison Druin and Cynthia Solomon, Designing Multimedia Authoring Environments for Children, John Wiley, 1996[5] Demetrios Sampson, European SchoolNet Revised Work Programme: WP15 Description, March 1998[6] Seymour Papert, Situating Constructivism, In: I. Harel and S. Papert (Eds.), Constructionism, Norwood, NJ, 1991, Ablex. 1-11.[7] J.C. Spohrer, Site Description: Apple Compuer’s Authoring Tools and Titles R&D Program, Artificial Intelligence Review, Netherland: Kluwer Academic Press, 1995[8] Jeremy Roschelle, Jim Kaput, Walter Stroup and Ted M. Kahn, Scaleable Integration of Educational Software: Exploring the Promise of Component Architectures, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 6, (1998), /98/6[9] Peter J. Bates, Telematics for Flexible and Distance Learning-Final Report, European Commission DG-XIII, 1995 http://www2.echo.lu/telematics/education/en/projects/publics/publics.html[10] Karl-Axel Nilsson and Bo Müller, Utvärderingsrapport 1997. Published on Internet address: http://www.lund.se/utb/informat/。