Multimedia and e-Learning integration for supporting training programs in agriculture by MOODLE

The NODES project aims at facilitating, for adult training / lifelong training, the use of multimedia knowledge to improve competitiveness employability and mobility of handicapped adults (physical and sensorial) and of adults victims of the digital divide or of some of its components such as distance, initial level of knowledge, language, use of complex technologies. The NODES project is focused, on the wide sense, on the production and diffusion of knowledge created within public and private organizations dedicated to adult training or by individuals, through Europe. Within the project the MOODLE e-Learning system was selected and more multimedia content will be integrated into the knowledge base. The EU-Index metadatabase collects content sources for the project partners. Another target is to integrate video files into the systems. This parts are integrated by the logical and physical architectures of the NODES

Report of the discussion on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for OER

Appendix: FOSS tools for OER development, management and dissemination

Teaching Digital Multimedia as a Component of Business Education

The growth of the Internet and the explosion of digital communication technologies in the 1990s have given rise to the importance of digital multimedia in the American economy. We define multimedia as the transmission of content through a combination of text, graphics, pictures, sound, animation, video, and hyperlinks, resulting in communication that is multisensory and potentially interactive. Multimedia has had an impact on Internet marketing, the music and motion picture industries, the education industry, and healthcare. It is therefore relevant to marketing and information systems and would seem to have a place in business curricula. The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of teaching digital multimedia in a business discipline. A review of multimedia offerings in higher education indicates that the concepts, technical aspects, and creation of digital multimedia are taught variously in computer science, the creative arts, communication, or psychology but are largely absent from the domain of business disciplines. We report on our experiences teaching a three-credit, 15-week, junior/senior-level Digital Multimedia course under the Computer Information Systems heading. Topics associated with the course include conceptual understanding of digital multimedia, business and legal issues surrounding digital multimedia, and technical underpinnings and skills in the creation of multimedia. A key component of the course is a semester-long team project on a topic selected by each group of students. Challenges in teaching the course include cost of hardware, software, and facilities; containment of the scope of topics; differing expectations of students entering the course; and availability of support materials

Digital television applications

Studying development of interactive services for digital television is a leading edge area of work as there is minimal research or precedent to guide their design. Published research is limited and therefore this thesis aims at establishing a set of computing methods using Java and XML technology for future set-top box interactive services. The main issues include middleware architecture, a Java user interface for digital television, content representation and return channel communications. The middleware architecture used was made up of an Application Manager, Application Programming Interface (API), a Java Virtual Machine, etc., which were arranged in a layered model to ensure the interoperability. The application manager was designed to control the lifecycle of Xlets; manage set-top box resources and remote control keys and to adapt the graphical device environment. The architecture of both application manager and Xlet forms the basic framework for running multiple interactive services simultaneously in future set-top box designs. User interface development is more complex for this type of platform (when compared to that for a desktop computer) as many constraints are set on the look and feel (e.g., TV-like and limited buttons). Various aspects of Java user interfaces were studied and my research in this area focused on creating a remote control event model and lightweight drawing components using the Java Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and Java Media Framework (JMF) together with Extensible Markup Language (XML). Applications were designed aimed at studying the data structure and efficiency of the XML language to define interactive content. Content parsing was designed as a lightweight software module based around two parsers (i.e., SAX parsing and DOM parsing). The still content (i.e., text, images, and graphics) and dynamic content (i.e., hyperlinked text, animations, and forms) can then be modeled and processed efficiently. This thesis also studies interactivity methods using Java APIs via a return channel. Various communication models are also discussed that meet the interactivity requirements for different interactive services. They include URL, Socket, Datagram, and SOAP models which applications can choose to use in order to establish a connection with the service or broadcaster in order to transfer data. This thesis is presented in two parts: The first section gives a general summary of the research and acts as a complement to the second section, which contains a series of related publications.reviewe