Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-97-13 Abstract

New Media, New Practices: Experiences in Open Learning Course Design
Techreport ID: kmi-97-13
Date: 1997
Author(s): Tamara Sumner and Josie Taylor

We explore some of the complex issues surrounding the design and use of multimedia and Internet-based learning resources in distance education courses. We do so by analysing our experiences designing a diverse array of learning media for a large scale, distance learning course in introductory computing. During the project, we had to significantly rethink the design and production of our learning resources as we shifted from a paper-based teaching model to an interactive teaching model. This shift entailed changes to our design products (to promote more effective media use by learners) and changes to our design practices (to foster consistent media use and design across a large and distributed team). Course designers and course students alike needed help in breaking out of paper-based models of learning to obtain maximum benefit from the interactive teaching model.

Publication(s):

To appear in: Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI '98), Los Angeles, 1998.

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection