TECHNOS

February 9, 2012

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Winter 1995 Vol. 4 No. 4

Beyond the Textbook: Learner-Powered Multimedia

By John Kerin and Charlotte Frank

In the information age, the new challenge is to add meaning to the onslaught of data available to us. Educational publishers, in particular, must provide easy access to the global information infrastructure for schools and offices.

Choose an answer: If you haven't personally experienced "information overload" yet, it's virtually guaranteed that you are

not enrolled in a school or college,
not part of the workforce,
somewhat out of touch, or
all of the above.

If you chose D, it's time to face up to the three opportunity-packed facts of life today:

A vast mix of undifferentiated information makes it increasingly difficult for "nonswimmers" (i.e., computer-illiterate students or workers) to survive, let alone thrive.
The choices offered by today's standard education, business, and government information systems can be enhanced to include the full range of truly individualized options made possible by new computer-based, "multisensed" technologies.
Drawing on Howard Gardner's concept of multiple intelligences, we now know that learners tend to learn better when multiple senses are engaged—which is what multimedia enables in a very natural way.

Surfing the Technology Wave

The publishing industry is well-positioned to surf the new technology wave. The traditional print publishing industry made the switch early on from typewriters, cut-and-paste editing, and linotype machines to computers. We now have the opportunity to evolve our thinking and organizational structure to leverage these technology gains. We can build on the familiar linear process, in which an individual publishing project starts with a group of writers and researchers and progresses through editors to the final product, by encouraging an active "cross-fertilization" of information at all stages in the editing, publishing, and distribution processes.

The opportunity to take full advantage of new technology is by no means limited to the publishing industry. Yet our industry is among those that can make the greatest contributions to society by seizing this opportunity. If students and workers are provided with world-class information that capitalizes on the latest delivery systems, the country as a whole can gain in many aspects of international competitiveness as well as personal achievement and fulfillment.

It is in the publishing industry's best long-term business interests, as well as among our social and civic responsibilities, to offer educational tools that help schools and colleges provide a constant supply of young people who are equipped with the latest skills—and with the understanding and flexibility to upgrade their skills continually to keep pace with emerging technology. We also know that our schooling system will falter and fail unless it is so intimately linked with the business world that the education it provides is truly "job-oriented." Our responsibility, then, is to find the optimal balance of educational content successfully integrated with the power of multimedia.

Beyond the Linear Process

There's a tendency outside the publishing industry to assume that the increasingly complex process of information exchange both begins and ends with the author whose name appears on a textbook's dust cover or an article's byline. This explains why publishers typically are eager to enlist authors that have gained a certain level of name recognition. The theory of sole-author dominance is being enhanced in the age of the Internet, CD-ROMs, and multimedia textbooks.

High-speed, low-cost, universally available electronic distribution over ordinary telephone lines is enabling us to go beyond the traditional, linear model of multitrack publishing. Today's increasingly sophisticated and discriminating information seekers are accustomed to the added value offered by "media-independent" publishing. One of our technology challenges at The McGraw-Hill Companies is to reinvent and enhance the current linear publishing process with an integrated system that can respond, in real time, to the information demands of emerging multimedia outlets. Rather than accelerating old publishing techniques with faster typewriters, we're developing a vast multimedia database system that codifies and organizes all information—author's manuscripts, reporter's dispatches, editor's observations—into a collective intelligence to be utilized by all the people involved in the publishing process. New technology will enable all "published" information—magazine articles, television reports, and, most important, educational materials—to be far more accurate, timely, and comprehensive than ever before.

Consider the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of integrated electronic publishing that

feeds the writer's raw product into a single, vast editorial database where all of the raw product is edited, coded, or tagged and formatted according to the same hypertext rules and
makes this single, integrated, uniform database readily available for constant and immediate repurposing so that the same accurate, verified, and updated information can easily be switched to different tracks—for print subscribers, for individual electronic subscribers, for online services, for on-site client databases, for multimedia CD-ROMs, etc.

Using relational database programming technology, CTB's publishing operations can draw—instantly—from a wealth of information that is organized for fast retrieval and easy conversion to the final medium.

Repurposing

Information downloaded from the Internet is, at best, inconsistent, ranging from public-domain, government documents to republished stories from a variety of sources. Even though the Net brings an ocean of information to a person's desk, the information is often out of context and unedited. The Internet is a pervasive, highly influential distribution method for educational materials, but without a publisher making editorial judgments and adding the value of context and perspective, the Internet is lacking as a primary source of information.

With our new electronic publishing model, we can take advantage of the latest technology and allow each of our writers and editors access to a vast, companywide editorial database. Using proprietorial technology, material prepared for a Business Week article on new financial instruments, for instance, becomes instantly available for use in Glencoe's economics textbooks. The new-wave educational package can include multimedia video clips that let us see and hear economists and floor traders debate the merits of the new instruments.

Unlike the public "bulletin board" of the Internet, we have total control over the material flowing into this proprietorial database; this control can assure accuracy and timeliness, regardless of whether a particular end product is a magazine article, a general-readership book, a multimedia presentation, or educational or training materials. We believe an educational publisher must offer this type of integrated editorial database if it is to respond and compete in the 21st century.

Electronic College Textbooks

One successful integration of effective educational content with the latest technology is our Primis Custom Publishing Division. This customized electronic-textbook publishing system is built around the tremendous wealth of information gathered and coded by the entire organization: financial information from the Standard & Poor's Rating Group; current events and technical analysis from our publications, ranging from Business Week to Chemical Engineering; and educational and medical expertise.

The specialized and copyright-protected Primis information treasure chest is coded to serve 17 different academic disciplines. By connecting with this database electronically, college professors select specific pieces of information and design their own custom-tailored textbooks. Individual instructors pick out material from The McGraw-Hill Companies' organized, edited, and constantly updated collection of textbooks, magazine articles, and technical papers and then mix these materials with their own contributions in whatever format and order they wish. Currently, the Primis system is being used by more than 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities to create timely, relevant, and cost-effective course materials.

In addition, anyone connected to the Internet can search our current catalog of 8,800 books on subjects ranging from architecture to nursing. America Online subscribers can read and download articles from Business Week a day before it hits the newsstands. Or they can search past issues and "chat" electronically with the magazine's writers and editors or with winners from its Schools in the Age of Technology program.

Steam Boiler Syndrome

Whether for schools, business, or government, integrating new technologies never seems to be easy. In making the transition to any new system, problems and skepticism always are part of the package. For example, 18th-century steam boilers had a tendency to explode and were condemned as monsters. Yet, despite the risks and daunting up-front costs posed by new technologies, human experience repeatedly has proven that early adapters can reap rich rewards for themselves and deliver tremendous value-added benefits to their customers. We think the risk and cost are worth the trouble. In addition, we believe that computer-based information gathering and education should be

totally "transparent"—giving a personal computer, for instance, the ability to gather information as readily from Moscow, Tokyo, or Prudhoe Bay as from your local school or office network without any additional effort on your part or any difference in time or cost, regardless of physical distance
equally accessible to all—because every school, library, workplace, and government agency will be seamlessly connected as part of the World Wide Web of the Internet or the Internet's next generation of browers.

Value-Added Information

Providing equal access to technology-transparent information gathering is essential but not sufficient.

The next step is to maintain the integrity of the best educational materials and not become distracted by the bells and whistles of new technology. We believe an educational publisher should build on its reputation for accuracy, comprehensiveness, and editorial judgment rather than simply provide bulk information that could be as likely to mislead as to inform.

In the area of educational materials, the implications of new multimedia technology are tantalizing and rich. Multimedia could become the core of new curricula that reach all students in the most effective ways possible. Properly designed and implemented, multimedia offers the ability to provide for Gardner's multiple intelligences by communicating in ways which incorporate all individual learning styles, whether aural, visual, or tactile (also called "hands on"). And because none of us learns by purely one single style, multimedia is capable of addressing all the senses simultaneously in a "natural" way that ideally offers more than even the most animated style of teaching.

Multimedia also can offer students precisely what they will need for tomorrow's working world: familiarity with the newly integrated worldwide "intelligence" that now includes far more accessible data stored in electronic form than is contained in printed form in all the world's libraries. Add to this the prospect that in the very near future, students and entrepreneurs not only will use the Information Superhighway to connect directly with this new global intelligence but also will be able to download information instantly in their own language, regardless of whether the source document happens to be in English, Russian, Japanese, or Hindustani. It's an exciting and challenging prospect, to be sure.

Ideally, multimedia will lead to the wholesale advances in the educational system that educators and parents have sought for decades. The hope is that multimedia-driven educational options will prove to be invaluable and indispensable to the next generation of teachers, students, and workers. It's far too soon to predict precisely what form the school of the future will take—or if it will be located in a distinct school or office building or become a home-based "virtual" school. The only certainty is that if multimedia delivers on its immense promise, then the lifelong learning environment of the future will be limitless because transparent technology will provide students with instant, direct connections to the world's information resources.

Online Education

We have traveled far enough along the Information Superhighway already to have middle school students in Juneau, Alaska, using the Internet, special keyboards, and synthesizers to improvise and compose music jointly with students in other states and other countries. Through our Schools in the Age of Technology Program, we are bringing this type of innovation to schools throughout the country. One way we do this is by enabling educators across the country to "talk" with winning schools via America Online and share educational concepts and strategies.

At Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, New Jersey, Judy Gray, one of the five national winners in Business Week's fifth annual awards for Instructional Innovation, makes it clear that multimedia has become an essential part of the curriculum for the school's 1,800 students.

As director for Hunterdon's Academy for Continual Development, Gray has found that multimedia can address all the different learning styles, enabling teachers to reach more students more effectively. She explains that it is past time to replace the rigid industrial model of education with new multimedia strategies. At Hunterdon, students are encouraged to use whatever resources work best for them individually, whether these are centered around multimedia or traditional textbooks. Thanks to broad support from the community and the state, Hunterdon High has a computer network that allows students to access school resources 24 hours a day and a communications building housing the high school's own radio and cable TV stations. Gray explains that students find such resources empowering and motivating. Students who aren't naturally inclined to write term papers can create equally challenging multimedia projects that present the same content and require the same synthesis of information.

Hunterdon High has had to change, both to prepare students for the workplace and to guide them through today's far more demanding curricula. Contrasting the 300- to 400-page biology textbooks that most adults remember with today's 1,200-page versions, it seems obvious that with the same 180-day school year, students increasingly need the proper skills and equipment to access and organize such voluminous materials electronically. That's why Hunterdon High's library includes some four dozen CD-ROM disk services (magazines on CD-ROM) that are regularly updated and easily accessible from any student's home computer.

The advent of multimedia does not mean that every student has to use a computer. Multimedia offers valuable options for students in their search for information and knowledge.

The "multiple intelligences" of multimedia-based education enhance our innate human skill for deriving meaning from multiple sensory inputs. To be successful, an educational publisher must recognize the power of this emerging medium and maximize its potential. Publishers that develop their own internal publishing resources to reflect the "hyperconnectivity" of the distribution media will define the future of educational publishing.

Click here to access the Multimedia's Coming of Age Sidebar that accompanied this article.

John Kerin is senior vice president of Information Management for The McGraw-Hill Companies. His responsibilities include providing strategic direction for the corporate-wide development of electronically based information products and services and creating policy regarding the company's use of information. Charlotte Frank is vice president of Research & Development for The McGraw-Hill Companies' Educational and Professional Publishing Group. She previously served as executive director of the Division of Curriculum and Instruction at the New York City Board of Education.