Learning style and learning strategies in a multimedia environment

There is a growing realization that it may be expeditious to combine elements from different theories of learning when trying to derive a coherent and usable policy towards computer‐mediated learning. Consideration of the subtle distinction between Computer‐Aided Learning (CAL) and Computer‐Aided Instruction (CAI) conform the basis of a possible classification of computer‐mediated learning, and hence of multimedia tools. This classification enables the development of a continuum upon which to place various strategies for computer‐mediated learning, and hence a means of broadly classifying multimedia learning tools

Reviews

Researching into Teaching Methods in Colleges and Universities by Clinton Bennett, Lorraine Foreman‐Peck and Chris Higgins, London: Kogan Page, 1996. ISBN: 0–7494–1768–4, 136 (+ vii) pages, paperback. £14.99

Towards the architecture of an instructional multimedia database

The applicability of multimedia databases in education may be extended if they can serve multiple target groups, leading to affordable costs per unit for the user. In this contribution, an approach is described to build generic multimedia databases to serve that purpose. This approach is elaborated within the ODB Project ('Instructional Design of an Optical DataBase'); the term optical refers to the use of optical storage media to hold the audiovisual components. The project aims at developing a database in which a hypermedia encyclopedia is combined with instructional multimedia applications for different target groups at different educational levels. The architecture of the Optical Database will allow for switching between application types while working (for instance from tutorial instruction via the encyclopedia to a simulation and back). For instruction, the content of the database is thereby organized around so-called standard instruction routes: one route per target group. In the project, the teacher is regarded as the manager of instruction.\ud \ud From that perspective, the database is primarily organized as a teaching facility. Central to the research is the condition that the architecture of the Optical Database has to enable teachers to select and tailor instruction routes to their needs in a way that is perceived as logical and easy to use

An interactive learning environment in geographical information systems

The Unigis Learning Station is a computer‐based learning management tool for the Postgraduate Diploma in Geographical Information Systems by distance learning (correspondence). Unigis is an international network of universities co‐operating in the delivery of such courses. The students on Unigis courses are mature mid‐career professionals who study in addition to undertaking full time jobs. The Learning Station offers these students information about the course, resources for independent study, a structured set of exercises, assessments and feedback opportunities, and an integrated and easy way to interact with other course software. Following a brief introduction to the Unigis curriculum, this paper discusses the design of the Learning Station. The roles the Learning Station adopts are outlined, and the range of multimedia and communications tools used discussed. Evaluation of the Learning Station is presented and the issued raised by this provide useful lessons for other computer‐based learning management tools, and the adaptation of the Learning Station to other teaching and learning situations

CHORUS Deliverable 4.3: Report from CHORUS workshops on national initiatives and metadata

Minutes of the following Workshops: • National Initiatives on Multimedia Content Description and Retrieval, Geneva, October 10th, 2007. • Metadata in Audio-Visual/Multimedia production and archiving, Munich, IRT, 21st – 22nd November 2007 Workshop in Geneva 10/10/2007 This highly successful workshop was organised in cooperation with the European Commission. The event brought together the technical, administrative and financial representatives of the various national initiatives, which have been established recently in some European countries to support research and technical development in the area of audio-visual content processing, indexing and searching for the next generation Internet using semantic technologies, and which may lead to an internet-based knowledge infrastructure. The objective of this workshop was to provide a platform for mutual information and exchange between these initiatives, the European Commission and the participants. Top speakers were present from each of the national initiatives. There was time for discussions with the audience and amongst the European National Initiatives. The challenges, communalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impact, success criteria, etc. were tackled. This workshop addressed how these national initiatives could work together and benefit from each other. Workshop in Munich 11/21-22/2007 Numerous EU and national research projects are working on the automatic or semi-automatic generation of descriptive and functional metadata derived from analysing audio-visual content. The owners of AV archives and production facilities are eagerly awaiting such methods which would help them to better exploit their assets.Hand in hand with the digitization of analogue archives and the archiving of digital AV material, metadatashould be generated on an as high semantic level as possible, preferably fully automatically. All users of metadata rely on a certain metadata model. All AV/multimedia search engines, developed or under current development, would have to respect some compatibility or compliance with the metadata models in use. The purpose of this workshop is to draw attention to the specific problem of metadata models in the context of (semi)-automatic multimedia search

Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE

A survey of comics research in computer science

Graphical novels such as comics and mangas are well known all over the world. The digital transition started to change the way people are reading comics, more and more on smartphones and tablets and less and less on paper. In the recent years, a wide variety of research about comics has been proposed and might change the way comics are created, distributed and read in future years. Early work focuses on low level document image analysis: indeed comic books are complex, they contains text, drawings, balloon, panels, onomatopoeia, etc. Different fields of computer science covered research about user interaction and content generation such as multimedia, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, etc. with different sets of values. We propose in this paper to review the previous research about comics in computer science, to state what have been done and to give some insights about the main outlooks