Wing Chun: Introducing Basic Wing Chun Kung Fu Using Instructional Multimedia

Wing Chun Kung Fu 3D is a conceptual website that offers people a new experience to learn and play Wing Chun Kung Fu via instructional multimedia. In the website, instead of showing the video or static images in a conventional way, users can learn basic Wing Chun with elements such as three dimensional visuals, animations, and interactivity. By having a TV-game interactive style to create a pleasant learning environment, I will demonstrate how to use instructional multimedia to teach martial arts through non-traditional methods. Website link: wk3d.co

At home with the future : influences on young children's early experiences with digital technologies

Early years curricula encourage practitioners to build on children's home experiences. Research into the kinds of activities that young children engage in at home and considerations of how to link these to their experiences in pre-school settings can therefore make an important contribution to practice. This chapter, which draws on studies investigating young children's home experiences with digital technologies, seeks to identify some of the key factors that influence the nature and extent of these experiences. Although digital divides - reflecting classic social divisions of economic status, gender and ethnicity - have been extensively explored in order to understand the causes of inequalities in access to digital technologies, our research concluded that parental attitudes towards these technologies are more influential than economic disadvantage in determining young children's experiences. To explore this issue in greater detail, we have drawn on the concept of prolepsis, a key influence on parents' interactions with their children deriving from the projection of their memories of their own idealised past into the children's futures (Cole, 1996). Parents' assumptions, values and expectations are influenced by their past experiences, enacted in the present, and are then carried by their children into the future as they move from home to formal education. We argue that prolepsis has powerful explanatory force for understanding the kinds of decisions parents make about activities such as the extent to which children engage in technological play

Semi-automated creation of converged iTV services: From macromedia director simulations to services ready for broadcast

While sound and video may capture viewers’ attention, interaction can captivate them. This has not been available prior to the advent of Digital Television. In fact, what lies at the heart of the Digital Television revolution is this new type of interactive content, offered in the form of interactive Television (iTV) services. On top of that, the new world of converged networks has created a demand for a new type of converged services on a range of mobile terminals (Tablet PCs, PDAs and mobile phones). This paper aims at presenting a new approach to service creation that allows for the semi-automatic translation of simulations and rapid prototypes created in the accessible desktop multimedia authoring package Macromedia Director into services ready for broadcast. This is achieved by a series of tools that de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces (UI) and applications for mobile terminals. The benefits of rapid prototyping are essential for the production of these new types of services, and are therefore discussed in the first section of this paper. In the following sections, an overview of the operation of content, service, creation and management sub-systems is presented, which illustrates why these tools compose an important and integral part of a system responsible of creating, delivering and managing converged broadcast and telecommunications services. The next section examines a number of metadata languages candidates for describing the iTV services user interface and the schema language adopted in this project. A detailed description of the operation of the two tools is provided to offer an insight of how they can be used to de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces and applications for mobile terminals. Finally, representative broadcast oriented and telecommunication oriented converged service components are also introduced, demonstrating how these tools have been used to generate different types of services