This is kind of interesting. We happened by the MacKiev booth near the end of the day and stumbled into a presentation by Roger Wagner. Roger was the original developer of HyperStudio. After he sold HyperStudio (the details of why are a little vague), HyperStudio kind of faded. At one point, development ceased.
One of the reason we care personally is that HyperStudio was one of the main examples of a tool students could use for multimedia authoring in editions 2 – 4 in our book. The decline of the product required that we adjust our perspective. We changed over to eZedia products for our present edition. If we move on to another edition, we will probably try to provide examples of both.
While the competition must be tough in creating products for the education market, it is great to see a reasonable level of competition. A little competition pushes companies to continue to generate improved products and gives consumers greater choice to match specialized needs.
If I heard correctly, the upgraded product is to be available for an August release date. Welcome back Roger – good to see you at NECC again.
A certain type of guilt has been embedded within my academic personality. I credit this to my early academic training. I am tempted to compare this to religious training, but I do not want to be accused of being politically incorrect. If I become excited about something and become an advocate, there is a little voice that constantly challenges me – what evidence do you have? Sometimes I admire those who can advocate without feeling the need to justify. Taking time to establish and communicate supporting evidence slows you down and takes away some of that “cool” from presentations. Well – enough of this public examination of my personal behavior.
I encourage educators to involve their students in content-based multimedia projects. Like any activity that competes for limited classroom time, the issue of impact should be considered. As I have examined in previous posts, this perspective is typically tagged as constructivist in orientation and the efficacy of activities grouped within this category has been challenged. What about counter arguments? This is a struggle. One argument I rely on defines multimedia projects as opportunities to engage in multimedia authoring potentially allowing one to draw upon the writing to learn literature.
I must being experiencing an especially bad case of academic guilt lately because I have felt the need for further justification. From the depths of my many years of experience, I have dredged up another concept – Teaching to Learn. Multimedia authoring resembles teaching to learn – mastering a specific body of information so that you can teach it to someone else. While this argument probably resonates with anyone who teaches, cool and logical sounding ideas still do not satisfy the true test (show me the data). I remember a topic associated with Mastery Learning (a topic that intrigued me many years ago). In some mastery systems, students serve as tutors for other students and the benefits to the tutors (often in college settings) have been examined. For example, Johnson and Ruskin (1977 – note the date here – I take some satisfaction in remembering this book was on my shelf) describe a study comparing the change in GRE scores for psychology majors who did or did not serve as tutors between the occasions on which they took the GRE specialty exam in psychology. The study reported much higher gains for those who served as tutors. Processing information while or so you can help others understand it appears to be beneficial.
One caveat – your mileage many vary. More and more I am convinced that benefits come not from doing an activity, but from doing an activity well. This may speak to the limited success of many constructivist ventures and perhaps to the benefits of uninformed teaching.
Johnson, K. & Ruskin, R. (1977). Behavioral instruction: An evaluative review. Washington, DC: American Psychology Association. (Benefits to proctors is discussed on page 145.)
Google has added a new tool to its collection of online resources. Google Page Creator is a template-based web authoring tool. A web author interacts with the tool using a browser much in the way one would interact with a blog tool. Google hosts the site (you are allowed 100 mb of content at present). Obtaining permission to use the site is developing in a similar fashion to that used to gain access to Gmail – you submit your name and wait. I was allowed to use the tool after a wait of less than two weeks.
Google Page Creator is still under development and evaluation so it would be dangerous to predict exactly where Google intends to go with this tool. Unlike other Google tools that include ads, it is unclear to me how this service will be supported. Perhaps it is another tool intended to draw users into the overall Google web of services (some of which generate revenue through ads).
I think online web authoring tools have educational potential. Tools such as this offer some multimedia authoring benefits beyond blog tools and are easier to use than dedicated, desktop-based authoring software.
The way Google tends to do things, these tools will represent a significant challenge for competitors. I like the new iWeb tool that came as part of iLife06. However, I had to pay for iLife and I pay for my .mac account. The cost is not high, but if Page Creator will eventually be available to all comers, schools may find Creator an attractive opportunity.
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