Hypermedia: a face lift for presentation research and development: a user services function
Authors: Richard Barone
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services (1988)

In the Summer 1988 issue of Wheels for the Mind Sueann Ambron, manager of New Technology in Education for Apple Computer, invites &ldquo;academic faculty members to experiment with multimedia in their teaching and research&rdquo;. Because she believes that technology is ahead of art in the field of multimedia development, she offers: &ldquo;This is the major challenge that multimedia now poses for educators &mdash; to bring all their artistry and creativity to the effort.&rdquo; In 1971, I was similarly invited to experiment with authoring languages and promptly set out to write the definitive CAI program for deficient mathematics students. I ran out of memory on my time-sharing system after completing less than 25 percent of the project. I kept the cards for ten years as a reminder of how I had been Babbagized. It is true we now have the microcomputer, the laser printer, the optical scanner, CD ROM, local and wide area networks and greatly improved user interface, yet most teachers are still reluctant to use the computer in the development of lectures and classroom lessons. Their reasons are valid: there aren't enough computers at their school, compiler and authoring languages are too difficult, and the payoff isn't guaranteed. The last of these excuses is the most enlightening, as it clearly indicates a lack of confidence in the technology with which Ms. Ambron invites them to experiment. The capabilities of the classroom computer must be demonstrated to members of the academic community so convincingly that the rewards will be evident and the investment of time and effort an afterthought. Academic Computing and Network Services at NU, specifically the Consulting and Education Group, has undertaken a project which has this as its goal. I agree with Ms. Ambron about the need to involve faculty in the emerging multimedia technology, but from my standpoint more than an invitation is needed. It is probably safe to say that many faculty members won't embrace the concept of multimedia with open arms, indeed some may feel threatened by the sweeping predictions being made about its future in education. Others, those who rarely or never use a computer, may be unaware of approaching changes to the foundations of teaching methodology. Because of the broad consequences expected from the onset of multimedia, we must address the entire faculty at this time, attempting to precipitate interest and enthusiasm, rather than reacting later when confronted with the far more difficult task of refashioning opinions. The project at NU, which I have unofficially named &ldquo;Facelift&rdquo;, was inspired by my experiments with HyperCard in the fall of 1987. With the navigational properties of HyperCard I was able to customize a visual presentation that could be adjusted to the expertise of the audience while in progress. I found that with a reasonable amount of planning I could provide supplemental information that could be easily accessed when tangential discussions arose, and that I could even provide for the &ldquo;graceful&rdquo; lengthening or shortening of the lecture if an unexpected timing problem occurred. The stack (the name for a HyperCard file) was easily updated and those who missed the lecture merely had to obtain a copy of the presentation on diskette (instant video tape). Soon I was adding graphics and animation to the stack and found myself wanting to write that old mathematics CAI program again. It occurred to me, in a moment of unconfined enthusiasm that: ALL PRESENTATIONS SHOULD BE MADE WITH HYPERCARD. After a relaxing weekend away from work, I rethought my declaration and concluded that&hellip;I was right, at least in the sense that all presentations should have the capabilities that HyperCard affords. All faculty members should have the option to use hypermedia in their lectures. The recent modification of two lecture halls to provide large screen projection displays of Macintosh output and the proliferation of Macintoshes on campus have made the idea feasible. Although I found HyperCard the long awaited missing link I had been waiting for, I realized that a non-programmer would not necessarily be as impressed. I engaged in the development of several HyperCard utilities to aid faculty and staff in the creation of hypermedia presentations, lectures, and text materials, and thus project Facelift was born. The utilities are themselves HyperCard stacks that make it simple for even the non-programmer to enhance lectures and text supplements with hypertext inserts, graphics and animation. User interface design was given high priority in the development of the utilities because of the broad scope of their intended user base. This resulted in a great deal of care in the selection of a metaphor for each utility, the designing of icons, and the pacing of screen displays during long periods of processing. Other important considerations included minimizing key strokes and mouse clicks for each action and the robustness of the utility, At present there are preliminary versions of three utilities. Stack Builder is a HyperCard utility that helps you create a presentation stack skeleton with partitioned presentation areas in minutes. The user then need only type the contents of the presentation into the appropriate partition. For the more dramatic presenter, exploding and sliding text inserts are available. HyperSlide Plus can be used with Stack Builder or on its own. It was designed to give you the ability to include a variety of special effects in presentations by providing templates for inserting text, graphics and animation. One option of this utility is the creation of slide libraries, databases in which slides can be stored and cataloged for future reference. HyperEasel is a graphics and animation work area. Pictures are imported to HyperEasel where they are prepared for insertion into HyperSlide Plus templates or directly into other stacks. Tools in this stack simplify and organize the complex task of creating &ldquo;flip card&rdquo; animation. Although these utilities are not yet ready for user testing, several faculty members have expressed interest in them. The next step will be to get one of these interested professors to generate a &ldquo;real&rdquo; application, perhaps, as one dean suggested, the conversion of an existing lecture to HyperCard. It should be clearly understood that the project's intent is to introduce faculty, especially those members with limited computer experience, to the virtues of hypermedia as a teaching tool. Hypermedia, the intermixing of various media such as sound, graphics and text into a single application, is not the same as multimedia. Multimedia is a much older concept and refers to the integration of a variety of visual and audio hardware devices in order to provide a heterogeneous display environment. The use of multimedia is not an immediate goal but more a logical progression for project Facelift. This is also true of the use of other related software like MacroMind's VideoWorks II, an animation program that has a HyperCard driver. It is hoped that once faculty get involved with hypermedia presentation, they will seek to expand there own horizons. Facilities to accommodate this progression are already being explored at NU. The IBM/PC has not been ignored in this project; Owl International's Guide is being considered as the language for a potential IBM/PC counterpart, but it currently lacks the capacity for hypermedia. Consequently this portion of the project will probably be put on hold until the full functionality of the OS/2 operating system with Presentation Manager is available. In the meantime, development will continue on the Macintosh with the awareness that HyperCard is by no means the definitive authoring tool. But it is flexible and cheap and most importantly provides something unique: it allows the casual user access to capabilities that were previously available only to programmers. In conclusion I will simply state that with the arrival of hypertext and hypermedia and the promise of multimedia, the lure of the computer for classroom use has never been more enticing. We must seize opportunities as they arise to get faculty involved in instructional computing and there may never be a better opportunity than the one that currently challenges us.