A Brief History of Interactive Media

Part 1 - Interactive Educational Games (1980-1987)
Part 2 - The Apple Multimedia Lab (1987-1992
     a. Professional Projects
     b. User-created Projects
     c. Reflections: Interviews with original members of the Apple Multimedia Lab
Part 3 - The New Era of Interactive Media in Education (2000-present)

Part 1 - Interactive Educational Games (1980-1987)
Interactive media for educational purposes has been around for over thirty years, though did not become mainstream until the mid-1980s. This coincided with the adoption of the Apple IIe in schools and classrooms across the country. This large installed based allowed interactive media programs to reach a large audience. The large development costs were thus no longer an impediment as mass distribution allowed developers to recoup their costs while still making such programs available at reasonable prices.

Oregon Trail

Oregon Trail was one of the first interactive multimedia pieces aimed at education and broadly distributed. Though first developed in 1971 by three student teachers to teach students about pioneer life in the 19th century, it did not gain widespread adoption until 1985 when it was released for the Apple IIe. The game dispelled traditional myths (friendly Native Americans were there to help) and allowed students to make decisions (hunting vs. traveling, ferrying vs. forging, etc) that encouraged students to engage in critical thinking while still enjoying themselves and learning a bit of history.

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

First relased in 1985, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” was developed by a former Disney artist and some software engineers to teach history and geography to middle school students. The game used a series of clues to track a simulated thief, thus encouraging participants to research destinations and become more aware of foreign countries. Though not utilized as much in the classroom as Oregon Trail, it none-the-less became a popular game and still managed to incorporate educational material. After a strong launch and widespread appeal, the developers launched into other versions, including: Where in the U.S.A is Carmen Sandiego (focused on U.S. history and geography), Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego (focused on natural wonders and other geographical features) as well as a popular TV series where life contestants would compete in comparable events.

Mavis Beacon

Mavis Beacon is currently distributed by the same software company that created “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego”. It aimed to teach students to type by using competitive games and interactive competitions to encourage students to learn the basic skills behind typing, which is otherwise a rather dry subject for students to engage. It was first released in 1987 and became a hallmark of American middle school classrooms, when few students had been exposed to typing either on a computer or typewriter. In today’s age, such instruction is still useful, though less so as most students have already adopted an approach to typing that is difficult to change once established.

Video:

Part 2 - The Apple Multimedia Lab (1987-1992)
Professional Projects


WorldView (1987) – a prototype of an electronic atlas. A user of Worldview simply clicked on a map and the geographical regions of the map were brought to life. Viewers could see pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Eiffel tower and do a flyby over the Nile, for example. In addition, the viewer could use the traditional reference aspects of the atlas, such as population statistics.

School Restructuring (1989) – an informational tool on school restructuring created in collaboration with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). This project provided background materials to engender effective dialogues about school restructuring. The materials were provided in 4 sections through which the viewer could click: topics (audio overviews), case studies (materials for particular school locations), issues (roundtable discussions), and stories (audio tales by different stakeholders).

User-created Projects
As the Multimedia Lab evolved the researchers found that significant learning took place while creating multimedia objects. As a result the lab developed a focus on user-created projects and tools for users to craft their own multimedia pieces. Examples of these tools and projects include:

The Visual Almanac: An Interactive Multimedia Kit (1989)—for the first time, this product made thousands of images, clips and captions along with a “Composition Workspace” available to educators to enhance classroom lessons. The Almanac also included examples of powerful professionally created clips for teachers to use and follow in building their own interactive educational tools using the library of information contained in the Visual Almanac.

The Grapes of Wrath —an onsite project where the Multimedia Lab worked with teachers and librarians at a Bay Area elementary school to develop an interactive software program to supplement the classroom teaching of The Grapes of Wrath using Apple’s Multimedia Production System. The tool included hundreds of articles, pictures, historical documents and exercises that allow students to explore the period of the novel first-hand. This project demonstrated the power of multimedia production software to revitalize the classroom when in the hands of dedicated and knowledgeable teachers and educators.

The Heart (1992) - an onsite project where the Multimedia Lab worked with fifth-grade students learning about the heart. Students first watched professional videos to learn about the heart and then created their own video reports that were immediately published on the computer. The Multimedia Lab’s experiment integrating cameras and computers into the learning process demonstrated how students learned while creating their own multimedia projects.

Readings
Downloads available below

Pea, Roy D. “Learning through Multimedia.” IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications. 1991: 58-66.In this chapter, the author discusses the power of composing multimedia, in particular using Multimedia Works. "Students who created the compositions learned about both the subject matter and how to effectively communicate using written text with graphics and video."

Semper, Rob. “HyperCard and Education: Reflections on the HyperBoom.” Learning with Interactive Media: Developing and Using Multimedia Tools in Education. 1990: 52-67.
The author discusses the use of the HyperCard structure as a framework for learning, emphasizing "learning by doing it yourself." "Life Story" is featured in the chapter.

Video:
Apple is currently working to make videos and materials from the Multimedia Lab available online. Please check their website for updates. www.apple.com

For video of The Heart and other user-generated projects, please visit www.newmediathinking.org

Reflections: Interviews with original members of the Apple Multimedia Lab
Interview #1
Kristina Woolsey asked her Multimedia Lab colleagues to reflect off the top of their heads on their experiences during this era.

KW: What were the major contributions of the Lab?
Margo Nanny (MN): The early prototypes because they had so much insight regarding the potential of the medium. The books, because they lived beyond the lab. The Visual Almanac because it still lives in memories of the old timers in the industry. The products we all made in the following years because at least they got out to the world for a period of time until the technology changed. The whole idea of multiple representations of data to help students understand big concepts was an important idea. Casual media work offered a lot of good ideas to the world. Naimark’s and Mohl’s ideas about time and space definitely influenced pieces that other companies did later.
Bob Mohl (BM): Visual Almanac. Self-documentation and dissemination of compelling videotape demos of all our projects.
Charles Kerns (CK): Since everyone I meet these days (even in villages in Mexico or from towns in India) calls themselves a designer and no one did in 1988, the Lab was part of the movement to make design a common word/act. The idea of Multimedia Products developed by design-driven enterprises. Design company startups - the lab was an incubator for many of these businesses. End-user authoring as in the Aspen project or in the Heart project in which kids explained themselves and their ideas with short clips and images.
Fabrice Florin (FF): We created compelling applications of interactive multimedia technologies like Quicktime and HyperCard. We also spearheaded important research on uses of digital media in education -- while growing a core group of designers, developers and educators that disseminated our findings to a broad community of partners and colleagues.

KW: Which ideas are adopted widely today?
MN: Multiple points of view like Moss Landing and the merry-go-round piece for Playground Physics haven't been exploited. There are lots of ideas about objects that Rosendahl & Gano demonstrated that the world hasn't gotten to yet. Fabrice Florin and Peter Maresca's work with images after the lab and playing games with asset databases hasn't been used by others. Baseball-like cards with bar codes for further data - though this certainly is working for objects in the grocery store. Ideas like those in the Life Story prototype and the AFT prototype have still not been used widely.
BM: Not enough attention to the role of sound and its potential to affect emotion. And conversely, not enough attention to educating the public to be aware about how their emotions can be manipulated by sound. Better ways of indexing video and searching image data bases.
CK: I am most bothered by the lack of student multimedia authoring in the formal curriculum in schools. The focus on testing has limited creative application of multimedia authoring in formal education. This means that everything interesting in learning is happening outside of school: the game world and recording of game world actions; presentations of self in MySpace etc.; recording of sports etc actions and posting of videos. Analytic tools like the Grapher and Grouper are not widely used. The multimedia object was a MMLab stab at end-user semantic representation but a lot of the new semantic web is driven by ontology development by experts, not by end user-exploration and discovery. Folksonomies and end user tagging look like they will be integrated into expert semantic modeling but full ontologies will be the real drivers and they are too complex for most users to do anything but consume.

KW: What has surprised you about how the area of multimedia has developed?
MN: In education it's been discouraging how the whole industry went for drill and practice, glitzy animation and low level content. They're just now getting to great uses of multiple representations with Smart Boards. You Tube, Google, and Web2.0 are surprises, though we thought of similar things with casual media, and users making their own compositions.
BM: (1) Not really a surprise but the same trend is reenacted over and over with each new multimedia technology - from computers to CDROM to Internet to cell phone, etc. All basically start with numbers and text; add graphics, images, animation and sound and end up with video. We keep trying to cram/compress more media into pipelines that were actually designed for less. (Ex. video into audio hardware.) Screens get smaller. Resolution tries to catch up. (2) As a result of previous point, we tolerate watching increasingly poor resolution on mobile devices even while home entertainment technology is advancing to higher and higher quality. (3) Again not a surprise, but despite Moore's law that capacity doubles every two years, "Mohl's law" states that we still wait on the computer as long as we ever have because developers increase the multimedia load at the same rate. (It's like just like more highway capacity still resulting in the same traffic jams as before.) (4) Still no solution to making video and story interactive. People are still more attracted to watching video than to interactivity. (Video games are perhaps an exception, but the format doesn't really extend well to learning environments.) (5) We always thought that once the public had access to VCRs they would not just record TV but make and show their own movies. It took a long time, but finally amateur filmmaking has hit the small screen big time as a direct result of YouTube.
CK: (1) The web and texting moved everything back to a textworld and slowed down a lot of multimedia development for many years. Text communication and collaboration became the norm with an image stuck in here and there. We went through fontmania again as happened with the Mac and Hypercard when they came out. (2) The ads. I assumed (actually never really thought about it) there would be a subscription or a product-based business model rather than a ad-based distribution. (3) Search driving everything. So much on the Web and half of it seems to be sales brochures or ads. Consumption of stuff, rather than learning, being the center of development, even for kids. (4) The difficulty/complexity of current authoring environments for creating multimedia stuff--now you you need to master the syntax and vocabulary of real programming languages (And you need a database too). These are not easy for teachers and students. Hypercard allowed a lot student and teacher messing around. Because of the current complexity, much end user development is form-based. There has been no tool like hypercard since its demise. (5) And the lack of interesting multimedia in curricular materials. Everything looks like a boooring textbook in formal materials.

KW: What are your favorite memories of the Lab and the 1987-1992 era?
MN: Aspen design conference, Paris - the early brainstorming and prototyping on Bob's boat on the Seine. Shooting all those crazy things - the merry -go -round, the balance beam, our personal objects from top drawers and handbags. Mohl and Naimark recreating Exploratorium experiments like the vacuum in reverse keeping a ping pong ball in the air. Doing research for playground physics, working with the teachers. Seeing students use our prototypes - especially Life Story, and Visual Almanac. Meeting that guy who shot all the California highways who eventually gave us footage for the scale model of the solar system, which eventually became part of Planetary Taxi, meeting great minds from everywhere who came to see our work and share theirs, doing demos for teachers and feeling as though we all could see how fantastically this would impact education (HA!)
BM: Directing hacky-sack activities on the roof during breaks. Being inspired by the high quality of work each different team brought to the projects. Invading Moss Landing. Working with Margo, using our HyperCard tools and our visual collections to discover exciting new applications. Testing prototypes with kids. The excitement of forging into new frontiers. The Aspen Design Conference where the Lab designed tools and activities for children in the town of Aspen. Less favorite memory: sometimes feeling like a charlatan, serving seductive kool aid to teachers and students, that used improperly, would undermine learning the fundamentals.
CK: Working in the schools and at Aspen with kids doing science and compositions with video and images.

Interview #2
We interviewed Kristina Woolsey to get her historical perspective on the Multimedia Lab and to help us answer the key question above.

RJ & JS: What was the impetus behind creating the Multimedia Lab?
Kristina Woolsey (KW): It was set up as a market development activity to illustrate the potential of the new product ---HyperCard --- for learning. In 1990 it moved to the Advanced Technology Group.

RJ & JS: The Multimedia Lab evolved from creating professionally-authored products to creating tools for self-authored products. Can you tell us about that transition?
KW: The early projects served as demonstrations of interlinked curricula, illustrating how HyperCard could be used to develop interactive interlinked content. Each of these projects included some kind of "make your own" capability, typically reorganizing or tagging materials.

We found that we learned a great deal about the content in putting together our projects. We also found that individuals were very enthused about working with media. Given these observations our later projects focused on the development of tools for users to create their own materials --- be they videotapes or interlinked media rich compositions.
Interestingly these kinds of tools are the elements that have made it into current practice. iLife and other tools provide students/teachers/everyone with the ability to create their own materials. However, something we hadn't anticipated is that these individuals' design sense is not naturally developed, and the lack of good models of possibilities has constrained media production to standard forms (e.g. typically linear movies).

RJ & JS: Why did you decide to close down the Multimedia Lab?
KW: During the five years of the Lab's existence, the "Multimedia Revolution" intensified. It was no longer a boutique idea, but instead a wildly dynamic change to ideas about what computers were for, and what capabilities were possible. The Lab was a skunkworks for innovation and demonstration. It was judged that this operation would be best taken inside Apple, where major technology developments were now underway. For a computer company this was a reasoned decision. The loss I think now is that a forum for the discussion of the ideas of multimedia learning did not find a new place in another company or in another context. For even as the technologies have become more sophisticated, there are major challenges in how media might be best incorporated into learning environments.

RJ & JS: Which ideas from the Multimedia Lab are adopted widely today?
KW: The general idea of the importance of images in learning was advanced by the Lab, as well as by others at the time. Additionally, the notion of non-linear editing systems for everyone, examples of a wide range of uses of video (more specifically movie clips) to enhance learning, and the general practice of projecting computer and computer controlled video to large group are widely adopted today.

RJ & JS: What did the Multimedia Lab projects reveal about the best uses of interactive media in education?
KW: They showed a fascination by teachers and students in the use of media for learning. They demonstrated that youth were extremely facile in the use of media tools (e.g. movie cameras and computers). They showed that teachers teaching in traditional classrooms could adopt media rich materials to their classes very naturally, and that these teachers found that these materials were useful to their students.

The New Era of Interactive Media in Education (2000 – present)
Introduction
Interactive media in education has evolved over the last twenty-five years from the use of professionally produced interactive educational games such as Oregon Trail to the development of professional and user-authored content in the Apple Multimedia Lab to multimedia software applications accessible to users of all ages. Key interactive media software applications used since 2000 include: the iLife suite and Keynote created by Apple and Microsoft PowerPoint.

iLife is a suite of multimedia software applications created by Apple in 2003. These programs are used to create, organize, view and publish digital content, such as pictures, movies, music, and web pages. iLife '08, released in August 2007, consists of five applications: iPhoto, GarageBand, iMovie, iDVD, and iWeb. This powerful application suite enables students to create and share media-rich digital project (see video section of this lesson).

Tutorial
iLife A Guided Tour http://www.apple.com/ilife/guidedtour/


iPhoto allows users to import, edit, and organize images and create photo books, slideshows or web pages. This enables students of all ages to engage in digital storytelling.


GarageBand allows users to create music, podcasts and record audio. This application enables students to develop language arts skills by providing students with the tools to prepare effective oral arguments and present them to their peers. Unlike a traditional oral report, GarageBand allows for editing and can be shared easily.


iMovie allows users to create movies that include video, photos, music, text and voice narration. iMovie enables students to write scripts, create storyboards and express their opinions/ideas. Students can share their movies by burning them to a DVD using iDVD, adding them to a website created using iWeb, send them to iTunes to view on an iPod or even publish them to YouTube.


iWeb allows users to create their own web pages with ease. Web pages can include photos, movies, blogs, podcasts, and links to other sites. Students can then publish their website with a .Mac account.
Visit http://www.apple.com/education/digitalauthoring/ilife.html for more information on the educational capabilities of iLife.

Examples of Digital Storytelling
The Center for Digital Storytelling is a California-based 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization rooted in the art of personal storytelling. They assist people of all ages in using the tools of digital media to craft, record, share, and value the stories of individuals and communities, in ways that improve all our lives. We encourage you to explore the stories on their website.
http://www.storycenter.org/stories/

Below are a few powerful stories currently on the CDS website.
Home...in past tense. by Bix Gabriel
http://www.storycenter.org/stories/index.php?cat=8
M.S.K. Running by Morne Solomon
http://www.storycenter.org/stories/index.php?cat=3

Presentation Software
The days of slide projectors and transparencies have been replaced with well-designed digital presentations made using Microsoft PowerPoint and Keynote by Apple. These two competing tools are used extensively in classrooms today.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation software application developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications. Microsoft PowerPoint runs on Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS computer operating systems. PowerPoint was first introduced for Mac OS in 1989 and for Windows in 1990. The application allows users to create slideshow presentations, composed of text, graphics, movies, sound, and music, that can be displayed onscreen or printed. It enables users to quickly create high-impact, dynamic presentations that can be shared easily. It helps students and lecturers communicate effectively with their audiences. PowerPoint has become the world's most widely used presentation program.

Tutorial
Start Using Keynote http://www.apple.com/findouthow/iwork/

Keynote is a presentation software application developed as a part of the iWork productivity suite by Apple. It runs on Mac OS computer operating systems. It was first released in 2003 and competes with Microsoft PowerPoint. Like PowerPoint, the application allows users to create slideshow presentations, composed of text, graphics, movies, sound, and music. Keynote is more media-friendly than Microsoft PowerPoint, which tends to make Keynote presentations more visually appealing. For example, Keynote enables 3-D transitions between slides and has engaging design templates. Keynote presentations can be displayed onscreen, printed, or exported as a PDF, PowerPoint presentation or QuickTime file. Presentations can also be sent to iTunes to view on an iPod.

Tutorial
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 demo http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA101672691033.aspx

Readings
Downloads available below
The two articles below show what students can do with iLife and iTunes...
Learning with iLife. Technology & Learning 27.11 (June 2007): p11(2).
Learning with iLife. Technology & Learning 27.10 (May 2007): p11(3).