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Rich Media >> Get Rich Quick
7/22/2005
In addition to the abundance of technological knowledge, the program also strives to impart to students something about the theory of rich media. Here, Kapp says the emphasis is distributed in every class where educators are encouraged to help students uncover which specific applications of rich media are truly rich. Will video enhance this lesson? D'es an audio file add anything other than bandwidth? By asking questions like these, Bloomsburg University educators get students to think critically about how to apply the technologies they’re learning about, and how to apply those lessons to field experiences in their internships and beyond. “ |
AT UMV, RICH MEDIA |
At the end of the day, there’s no better way to teach students about interactive technologies than to use interactive technologies,” says Kapp. “Everything about our program—from the subject matter to the lessons themselves—is designed to embrace the richness of rich media completely.”
Alternate Approaches
At the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, technologists have explored different types of innovations in interactive technologies for synchronous communication, but one of their most successful undertakings operates asynchronously, as faculty members and students see fit. These rich media efforts revolve around a collaboration program called Webcafé, a glorified bulletin board designed to facilitate collaborative study partnerships, as well as extracurricular project planning for activities in and around the Philadelphia community.
The effort began back in 1998, as a portal for students in only 25 select classes. By 2003, every student in the school’s 450 business and management classes was given the opportunity to use it. Today, Webcafé is open to all students and faculty members, plus some staff, with 7,500 concurrent users at any given time. Rob Ditto, senior IT project leader, says Webcafé has become one of the most commonly used technologies on Wharton’s campus, second only to e-mail.
To use the system, users simply log on with a standard Web browser, from wherever they might be. Behind the scenes, Webcafé runs on software from EMC Documentum (www.documentum.com), an enterprise content management tool that helps users create and share any number of files, including digital text documents, engineering drawings, still images, audio and video files, and many others. Ditto says he wrote a separate program that enables students to upload assignments to a secure server, and allows faculty members to exchange comments with students in a secure environment that stores the comments as part of a gradebook database. The software also features more lifestyle-oriented collaboration spaces, which students use for more practical purposes such as maintaining a database of summer sublets, or voting on which stocks are the best bets for investment.
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