UK Office Launch
Bob Hopgood [HREF1], Visiting Professor School of Technology, [HREF2] ,Wheatley Campus, Wheatley, Oxford, OX33 1HX, UK [HREF3], bhopgood@brookes.ac.uk
Much of today's teaching material is based on PowerPoint or similar systems. This poster gives some alternative approaches based on web-based technologies.
Tim Berners-Lee, when he invented the Web in 1989, believed it would be an information space for all human activities from hypertext books to shopping lists. In 1994, Tim became the Chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) whose role is to produce the standards upon which the Web is based (CSS, HTML and HTTP early on, XML and XSLT later). Almost the first presentation given by Tim was a set of hyperlinked web pages and W3C has required its staff to give presentations based on Web technologies ever since. This poster gives a short history of these systems and shows how they can be deployed as an alternative to conventional presentation systems used in education.
I have been teaching at Brunel University since 1967 in which time I have used a range of technologies illustrated in the attached slide (click on the buttons to show the evolution: you will need to have an SVG plugin that only takes a minute or two to download for IE. I used PowerPoint to teach both Compiler Writing and Computer Graphics Courses at Brunel from 1988 to 1996. Being the W3C Advisory Committee Representative for the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) from 1994 until 1998, I started a Web Technologies Course at Brunel and decided to use web pages for presentation. Since my retirement from RAL, Professor David Duce and I have expanded the single module Brunel Course to a 6-module Web Technologies Masters and made the decision to have all the material related to the Course web based (publicity, course material, course work, self tests etc).
This is best illustrated by showing a few examples from the W3C:
In 1998, I took over as Head of Offices at W3C with the task of launching and equipping the W3C Offices that were to be rolled out initially in Europe with funding from the European Commission. The Offices needed material as slide sets for presentations, flyers for handouts and material for stands at exhibitions. We used a similar approach to all three based on the existing slide systems.
UK Office Launch
The Offices often needed to tailor presentations to various audiences and to handle this we added class
attributes to the <h1> elements so that slides could be included in the current
presentation based on the classes they belonged to.
Initially we had 1000 slides covering 20 standards that grew to 2000 slides covering 40 standards
over a 2-year period.
The W3C Offices have continued to build up the presentation material with innovations coming from Ivan Herman (the Dutch Office and now Head of Offices at W3C), Brian Matthews (UK Office) and Hoylen Sue (Australian Office).
Ivan Herman, Hoylen Sue, Brian Matthews
The main interests of each are:
Most of the systems currently being used are based on XML and XSLT. The slides are defined as an application of XML and an XSLT transformation is applied to the slide definition to either generate a slide set in separate files or select some part of the document that defines the slide set for display. Effectively, you have a single slide of which only part is selected for viewing. Both Hoylen Sue and Brian Matthews have systems that work in this way while Ivan's and mine generate separate slides. There are pros and cons for both approaches.
Various Slide Systems
An XML, XSLT-based Slide System
As the author is in control of the XML and XSLT transformation, tailoring a system to suit a person or organisation's needs is much easier. At Brookes, we create slides, handouts in both PDF and XHTML formats, a CD-ROM from the one XML file. We also have a number of housekeeping utilities that we can run over the slide sets. For example, we produce a file indicating which images are required by each lecture and so establish which are no longer referenced.
Hoylen Sue's system at DSTC [HREF8] is the one that has spent most time looking at the styling of the slide set providing functionality that is at least as good as PowerPoint if not significantly better. He lists the design goals as:
A problem with the single page approach is that whenever you hit the refresh button it will revert to the intial page. Brian Matthews [HREF9] has solved this by having a cookie that keeps a record of where you are in the presentation.
Once the course material is based on the Web, it is relatively easy to incorporate animation and interaction into the slide set. Some examples just to give the flavour of this are shown below.
Animation showing packets passing across an IP network, some being lost in transit.
Students can do an experiment on the parameters related to user interaction using a pointing device from which they can deduce Fitt's Law .
An animation of entries being made to a linear and quadratic hash table showing the advantages of the second in avoiding clustering.
A static picture showing the evolution of XHTML but hyperlinked to all the relevant standards documents
Some of the advantages of web-based slide systems are:
One of our students this year had the slides for lectures on his PDA. Mobile phones support is available then we will have to let them leave them on ;-)
We have looked at the cost of converting from PowerPoint to web based by taking a colleagues slide set of 45 PowerPoint slides with animation in them. Most were transformed in 2 hours and it would have been quicker if we had used the text output from PowerPoint rather than use as a converter to HTML (that added more problems than it solved). The last 5 slides were an animation showing how multicast broadcasting is set up by various packet transmissions. This took about 5 hours to translate. However, the result was an animation that correctly showed the timing of when packets were initiated rather than the PowerPoint presentation which gave an imprecise view of what was going on. Moving to a web slide-based system is not free and it may be that some other factors might be the impetus that triggered the change.
Until recently, there were no commercial offerings as alternatives to PowerPoint. DSTC's JackSVG was the nearest. Recently Icytec [HREF10} has launched InsightPoint 2.0 which gives similar facilities to powerPoint but using SVG as the delivery vehicle.
![[HREF8]](http://titanium.dstc.edu.au/xml/jacksvg/docs/sample-natty-blue.svg){kind=link}
