James Sawers, Faculty of Education, The University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123 Broadway NSW 2070, Australia. Phone +61 2 9514 3835 Fax: +61 2 9514 3939 James.Sawers@uts.edu.au
Lyn Schaverien, Faculty of Education, The University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 223 Lindfield NSW 2070, Australia. Phone +61 2 9514 5077 Fax: +61 2 9514 5666 L.Schaverien@uts.edu.au
distributed multimedia/hypermedia, generative learning, science, science teaching, teacher education, virtual classrooms, WWW.
This poster describes some of the technical aspects of implementation of a project (described in full elsewhere (Schaverien, Sawers & Sen,1997)) to produce a prototype hybrid Internet-/Jaz-based Generative Virtual Classroom (GVC). This GVC uses digitised video and sound to create a virtual school science classroom for Education students. Nested with that classroom is a virtual tertiary classroom in which Education students can record their insights into science learning first as notes and then as organised records in a shared, searchable community database. As well, they can listen to their lecturers' narrative and conversational commentary on these science learning events and participate in on-line and/or asynchronous discussions about them. We outline the project to date and our intention to produce a custom web browser interface using the recently released Director 6 [HREF1]. This interface will allow us fine-grained control of the multimedia elements, as well as access to dynamic content on the web for reference material, online discussions and access to the shared database. We focus on some of the seminal design decisions during the project's development, including our decision early in the prototyping stage to use Netscape Navigator as a helper application for the prototype as opposed to the main delivery vehicle.
A well-recognised problem exists with respect to science teacher education: significant examples of children's generative learning in science are so rare as to be almost absent from primary schools. Thus, Education students are unable to observe such learning or develop insights into how they might best support it in classrooms. The Generative Virtual Classroom sets out to address this problem by providing authentic examples of significant science learning and effective science teaching, and, at the same time, it presents a sophisticated computer-mediated strategy by which a community of Education students might articulate and advance their theories of learning. In particular, it aims to develop Education students' appreciation of the essential act of learning as one in which learners generate ideas and test these ideas on their value. Thus, the GVC represents a way of scaling up labour-intensive mentor-supported teacher education so that many students might develop a deep understanding of science learning and effective science teaching.
The project was initially conceptualised with web delivery in mind and work was begun in June 1996 with a beta of Netscape 3, which showed promise because of its integration of quicktime movies within the browser window. It soon became clear however that loading and playing a 320x 240 faststart movie 'direct from the local hard disk' was far too slow , let alone it playing over a network. Navigator and HTML also provided very rudimentary control of the data, sound and pictures needed for the GVC to function reliably and fluidly even in multiple frames using javascript.
We subsequently researched available (mid-1996) authoring tools to create the prototype, including:
Director with Fileflex [HREF2], which was neither multi-user nor distributed over TCP/IP.
Hypercard [HREF3] with Fileflex which was neither multi-user nor distributed.
Toolbook [HREF4] was neither relational, multi-user nor distributed.
Supercard [HREF5] was neither relational, multi-user nor distributed.
HyperStudio [HREF6] was neither relational, multi-user nor distributed.
Oracle Media Objects [HREF7] promised a lot but was very crude and non distributed.
mTropolis [HREF8] would require some low level C or C++ to access an ODBC DB.
Quest [HREF9] with MSAccess[HREF10]seemed an option but we wanted to work cross platform.
Authorware [HREF 11] with MSAccess also seemed an option but it was unclear whether this could work outside of a LAN environment.
We finally chose to prototype with FileMaker Pro 3.0 [HREF12] as it:
It became apparent however that FileMaker's handling of multimedia objects was crude to say the least. Sound and video clips if paused would rewind when a user changed the focus of the mouse from a data field to a media field, which made research and annotation of the media clips untenable.
The media was then moved outside FileMaker to the MoviePlayer application and control of the launching and quitting of these clips was handled with Apple Events from within FileMaker. Marionet [HREF13] was then investigated to provide web content within the FileMaker framework but it seemed more expedient to launch URL's from within FileMaker, parse these to Navigator via Apple Events and to have the web content appear in the browser as a helper application.
At the time of writing (April 1997) the prototype is complete and is being tested with Teacher Education students at UTS. The media is held on a 1 gigabyte Jaz drive and the 5 related Filemaker databases can either launch from a local machine or be served centrally via TCP/IP. The records held in local databases are reconciled via export and import to the central server.
The FileMaker Pro application provided a simple, easy to use, media rich prototyping environment with the added benefit of being able to control external applications via Apple Events. It is however, fragile, with two external applications (MoviePlayer and Navigator 2) being used to display content. To produce an application that is more robust we have submitted a CUTSD application intended to consolidate, integrate and extend the environment and to this end we are investigating the recently released Director 6 which will allow:
This combined with a web accessible database ( the existing FileMaker tables can perhaps be repurposed) via a CGI such as Lasso [HREF14] we will be able to fulfil the original vision of a Web hosted virtual classroom where students can view media, learn, reflect, and communicate at any time and from any place.
Schaverien,L. & Sawers,J & Sen, S (1997) A virtual classroom for elementary school teacher education in science, proceedings of SITE '97.
James Sawers, Lyn Schaverien©, 1997. The authors assign to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.