Week 5 – Hardware and Multimedia Instructional Design

Objectives
Reading
Training
Individual Project
Learning Team Project
Lecture - Hardware and Multimedia Instructional Design
Discussion Questions

Objectives:

• Distinguish strengths and weaknesses among operating systems.
• Compare and contrast the different network topologies.
• Identify computer components.
• Create an instructional/training project incorporating multimedia features into presentation software.

Reading

Read Chapters 9 in Multimedia: Making It Work

Chapter 9 is a good read for all of you. It gives a good basic overview of the two major types of operating systems and gives a good explanation of RAM, ROM, input and output devices, and connectivity types (Modems, DSL, Cable). This is a good chapter to read through just to get computer and internet literate..

Training

Find tutorials on PowerPoint or other presentation software on the Internet and/or go through the tutorials found on the Tutorials by Week page. Also, continue to work with the Basic Website tutorial page to finish up your personal and team website projects.

Projects:

Go to the Projects page and follow the instructions for going through the tutorials for Week 5.

Individual Project - Multimedia Presentation

You continue to build your web site this week, incorporating the criteria listed on the Assignments page.

Learning Team Project – Continue working on the Team Web site.

Check the Calendar for specific due dates for all assignments, both individual and team.

Hardware and Multimedia Instructional Design

Review of Week 4

In Week 4 we talked about the development process of designing a multimedia instructional site.  Again, it tied in the importance of project management because there are likely to be many different pieces that must be developed separately and then assembled to produce the final product. 

In Week 5 you will read about integrating the user interface pieces such as graphics, media, the actual look and feel of the web pages with the ‘back-end’ programming.  All through this process teams have played a huge part in development and this week we add the programmers who will add the functionality to the site.

Tag-Based Languages and Scripting Languages

Tag-based languages are known as mark-up languages and some examples are HTML, XML, SGML, and WML.  These languages use tags that look like < > and have an opening and closing tag.  The tags tell the browser how to display the items between the tags. HTML is much like the WordPerfect where you can select the option to ‘Reveal Codes’ so that you can figure out why a word that you thought you had bolded is not bold on the screen

Scripting Languages are high-level programming or command languages that are interpreted or translated on the fly to binary codes as opposed to being compiled ahead of time.  Such languages are either procedural or increasingly common as object oriented.  Some examples of scripting languages are JavaScript, Visual Basic, and Perl (CGI scripts).

HTML is the essential language tool for creating any Web page as contrasted with scripting languages, which are necessary for rendering a simple and static page into a dynamic page with interactivity.

 Dreamweaver, FrontPage and GoLive do a nice job of writing JavaScript and embedding media objects in WYSIWYG mode.  The also can debug basic problems with JavaScript and Java codes.

Interactive Multimedia

There is a subtle but significant different between multimedia and interactive multimedia.  Multimedia as we have been defining it up to this point is different types or ways of presenting information.  Text, graphics, audio, video, etc.  The user is able to interact on a limited level in this description by starting, stopping, and rewinding audio or video.  But that’s been the extent of the interaction.

In interactive multimedia, the user has a much higher degree of control over what’s displayed on the screen.  The user can also interact with simulations and programs so that the result is dependent on the input from the user.  This type of interactivity requires high-level programming or ‘back-end’ programming.

Simulations are computer-generated or presented scenario or environments that imitate the reality, not only in terms of results or appearance but also and more importantly in the interactions and processes.

Some nice examples of math learning demonstrations that use Java applets go to http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/Instructional_Demos.html and experiment with putting in different variables.

Tools that are commonly used to create interactive multimedia objects are Macromedia Flash, Director, and Authorware.

If you are worried that bandwidth issues will affect the interactive multimedia components that you would like to incorporate into your instructional web site, you always have the option of putting the media on a CD-ROM and sending it to your user.  Usually most media and multimedia will run considerably more predictably from a CD-ROM.  For the engineering courses I designed at UTA, we put all of the media on CD-ROMs and packaged them with the textbook. 

It becomes very clear from reading the text that if you are going to do any type of interactive multimedia that requires high level programming, you are going to need the expertise of a programmer on your team.  They should be involved in the project from the start and will give you good information to work from to be able to fulfill your clients’ requirements.

Remember the example I talked about in Week 1?  The lessons that were created in Flash but kept crashing the machines?  Well, the text talks about memory leaks, when a program does not properly free up the memory after running, thus causing the machine to crash.  This is part of the problem they discovered with the Flash modules they had created.  It took them a long time to discover that this was the problem and then to figure out how to fix the ‘bug’.

Speaking of bugs, I hope you enjoyed the story of how the word ‘bug’ came about as a term that describes when a program doesn’t work correctly.  Here’s the link to Admiral Grace Hopper’s log on that fateful day of Sept 9, 1947 and her ‘bug’.  http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/1996/hopper/bug.htm

Again in this week’s text, the role of the project manager is central to the success of the project.  The project manager’s job gets more complex as the level of the interactivity increases.  Good project management skills are obviously a plus in these types of situations.  In my job, if it didn’t work right, or it didn’t get done on time, I was held responsible, regardless of the fact that I, personally, was not creating many of the pieces of the instruction.  It was through good teamwork, excellent communication, and lots of chocolate chip cookies (my programmer’s favorite) that we were able to meet our deliverable dates on time and many times earlier.

References:

Vaughan, T. (2004). Multimedia: making it work (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Discussion Questions for Week 5:

Check the Calendar for due dates.

1. Locate a tutorial on PowerPoint or presentation software of your choice. Describe three tips you learned by taking the tutorial.

2. What are the most important considerations when designing an instructional multimedia product for your target audience? Explain your response.