Word: multimedia
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TECHNOLOGY What is multimedia? And who would want...
...good interactive multimedia can be fiendishly expensive to produce. Development costs for a typical title start at a quarter-million dollars. IBM this week will unveil the most ambitious -- and expensive -- multimedia project ever attempted: an elaborate exploration of Columbus' world created by former Hollywood filmmaker Robert Abel that took more than a year and some $5 million to produce. Packed with 180 hours worth of slickly polished text, art, music and video sequences (among them an interview with one of the explorer's living descendants), the program, which will sell for about $3,000, takes pains to represent...
...Multimedia programs like this are likely to be enthusiastically received in America's schools, which for all their complaints about financial problems seem to have plenty of cash to spend on new educational technologies. The state of Florida has contracted with ABC News and National Geographic to develop multimedia programs on subjects ranging from the environment to the cold war. This fall more than 500,000 Texas schoolchildren began using a videodisc series, Optical Data Corp.'s Windows on Science, in lieu of a standard textbook, as their first formal introduction to science. William Clark, president of Optical Data, argues...
Some critics are not so sure. While conceding that interactive multimedia may prove useful in helping students visualize abstract concepts in physics or math, many fear that the tools of multimedia will turn the traditional educational experience into something more akin to television. Author Steven Levy, writing in Macworld magazine, insists that the ability to express oneself in words and to understand the words of others is essential to the process of thinking. "But multimedia laughs at that objection," he writes, "because multimedia, like television, is designed to entertain, at the cost of thinking...
...interactive multimedia will succeed, at least at some level, ! because for certain purposes it makes good sense. In the business world, it is already being embraced as a tool to train workers in such complex skills as aircraft maintenance and computer repair. But multimedia still lacks what computer companies call the "killer application," a program like the electronic spreadsheet or the word processor that is so compelling that consumers will buy a new device just to run it. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, every new medium takes its content from its predecessor: early films were simply recorded stage plays...