A boon for education, but can schools afford them?

In mid-October, as the Clarence Thomas revue concluded on Capitol Hill, CD-ROM Expo convened at the Washington DC Hilton.

IBM stole the show by introducing, with considerable hoopla, the long-awaited, much-demonstrated interactive multimedia educational title Columbus: Encounter, Discovery, and Beyond, developed by Robert Abel’s Synapse Technologies, and the first five Illuminated Books and Manuscripts developed by AND Communications — The Declaration of Independence, Hamlet, Ulysses (based on the Tennyson poem), Letter from Birmingham Jail (based on Martin Luther King’s famous missive), and Black Elk Speaks.

The six products will be shipped in final form in June of 1992. Each title, which IBM refers to as a “program” or “knowledge system,” is in essence a multimedia database with text, motion video, graphics and audio. The programs incorporate both analog videodisc and digital CD-ROM technology, to transcend the technical constraints of either medium. If the developers needed motion video, they put it on videodisc. If they needed to permit the search of a text database, they put the software and the files on CD-ROM.

Columbus makes the events of 1492 the entry point into European and New World history, with topics ranging in time from ancient Greece to 20th-century America. Distributed on three videodiscs and two CD-ROMS, it is said to contain enough multimedia elements for 180 hours of instruction, including hundreds of thousands of documents and images. The five Illuminated Books and Manuscripts are contained on a total of six videodiscs and seven CD-ROMS.

The user interfaces for Illuminated Books and Columbus differ, but each provides a set of navigation tools that invite exploration of the database along various hyperpaths. An instructor or a student can request an explanation of a word or phrase, choose a more in-depth treatment of a particular subject, branch to a related topic, or ask the system to place an event in historical and geographical context, such as on a timeline or a map. They can view video clips of speakers expressing different interpretations and points of view. In the Illuminated Books and Manuscripts programs, users can see different actors’ readings of the same lines or receive an analysis of the literary devices and forms employed.

Students and teachers are also given the option of adding their own annotations to the database.

Because of their nonlinear structure and the wealth of resources they contain, the IBM “knowledge systems” are said to be useful from kindergarten through college. Teachers and students supposedly can draw from materials appropriate to grade level, ability and interests. Schools will pay a $2,000 license fee for each title; retail price is $2,857. Titles are compatible with large-screen displays for whole-class viewing, but individual PS/2s with smaller monitors can also be used.

IBM depicts these titles as important steps in what IBM vice president James Dezell calls “restructuring education through technology.” Inspired by Abel’s Guernica prototype (implemented on Apple hardware), the new IBM materials are perhaps the most fully elaborated examples yet produced of how interactive multimedia might invigorate schools and enliven learning. They represent an all-out attempt to make genuine intellectual exploration in history and literature exciting to the Nintendo and MTV generation.

They are, however, complex in several respects, and they currently require expensive hardware plus a large up-front cost to schools for the titles themselves. How educators and students will respond remains to be seen. Do these “knowledge systems” point the way to the classrooms, textbooks and libraries of the future, or are they another powerful technology that schools will underutilize?

Bernard Banet