Educational uses for Rev

[Wilhelm Sanke]

In June our university hosted an international conference about 
E-Learning. The new buzzword coming up in almost all plenary 
presentations was "blended learning", meaning a mix of online and 
offline learning, but still with widely varying accentuations concerning 
the role of the offline part.

Additionally, 23 projects developed at our institution were presented in 
booths during the duration of the two-day conference.

I think the most important project going on here is "Winfoline", 
developed by my colleague Prof. Winand. It can be called "important" as 
it has been accepted as a learning platform by a couple of other 
universities and because it get parts of the funding from our federal 
government.

You can look up information about it under

<http://winfoline.wirtschaft.uni-kassel.de>
<http://www.winfoline.de>

This project also favors some "blended learning"; there are English 
parts of the websites.-

Although I sometimes cooperate very closely with Prof. Winand - having 
been jointly responsible for theses dealing with aspects of information 
sciences and educational technology and also conducting oral 
examinations - I have not yet been able to convince him of the benefits 
of XTalk languages.-

Our own booth presentation focused on our project "Language Suite" 
developed with Metacard, but offered samples of other educational 
materials. A short description of the "Language Suite" project is to be 
found - still in German - on page "Projects: Language Suite" of my 
website <http://www.sanke.org>, English version. The stacks themselves 
will be publicly available soon as demo versions.

The most frequently asked questions from participants of the conference 
at our booth was "Where is the browser?" and the feedback that 
apparently impressed them most was

- our indication that there was no need for a HTML browser, and
- demonstrating the ability of Metacard/Revolution to start programs 
online without browser assistance and being connected to five different 
websites simultaneously (RevNet, California; Metacard-Site, Colorado; 
Himalayan Academy, Hawaii; Tactile Media, California; FTP-Server Uni 
Kassel, Germany).

We also tried to convince them of the higher degree of "interactivity" 
possible with XTalk languages as compared to browser-based languages.

I addressed such questions some years ago in an article about

"Interaktives Lernen im Internet? -
Fragen zum Design und zur möglichen Nutzung von Lernmaterialien über das 
"World Wide Web", 1997,

which at some points raises issues similar to those in Richard Gaskin's 
"Beyond the Browser". The German version of my article is available on 
page "Texte", website <http://www.sanke.org>, German version.-

Interestingly, one of the other booth presentations was about about a 
project originally developed with Metacard ("Simulation 
Handelsvorteile", page "Student Samples" of my website), but 
re-programmed with Flash. The student had developed this simulation 
using Metacard in a few days. He attracted the attention of a colleague 
from "Computational Mathematics" who however persuaded him to re-program 
it with Flash as a "real" programming tool by offering him a one-year 
and well-paid contract as a research assistant. It took the student two 
months - so he told me - to achieve with Flash (he had to learn Flash 
from scratch) what he alrady had achieved using Metacard; the results of 
his efforts look very much identical, the biggest difference being that 
resizing - and adapting the simulation to screen size - is much easier 
in Flash than with Revolution/Metacard.


-- Wilhelm Sanke, Prof.
   University Media Center
   University of Kassel, Germany
  <http://www.sanke.org>