russ@prism.gatech.EDU (Russell Shackelford) (06/07/89)
Someone recently posted an inquiry about IBM Infowindow. I lost it. I have seen demo products developed for this thing. The basic scheme that I saw examples of involved custom laser disc video hooked up to an AT (or was it something fancier? RT? I forget...) that had a touch screen monitor. The video would run on the monitor and at programmed points in the video the user could access other things via onscreen buttons. I saw something done for teaching foreign languages by some people at Cornell. So, you get the alleged benefits of interactive video for education. I personally have a lot of doubts about the actual value of what I saw and of the potentials that I could imagine further. I saw this stuff in the context of working on Computer Supported Instruction at Georgia Tech in a joint project with IBM. There were quite a few universities that had roughly analogous contracts with IBM, and thus we'd get together at conferences and do dog and pony shows... Interactive video is, in the context of IBM's academic intentions for Infowindow, a fancy version of programmed instruction. This is an approach with serious inherent difficulties, all of which are evident in the Infowindows approach. Chief among them are (a) extremely high cost relative to other utilization of resources, (b) rigid and centralized control of the learning process (about which we know far too little), (c) a poor match with established instructional infrastructures and practices, and (d) a dearth of REALISTIC evidence of ANY effectiveness. In short, it is how you would go about spending too much money in the pursuit of high-tech solutions to problems you hadn't adequately studied. Which is exactly what IBM was doing during this period (83-86). They were BIG on "courseware", of which Infowindows is a dazzling example. Since then, they have noticed that they spent a ton of money and got precious little that was of any USABLE value. Why? Because they set out with a course charted before they did their homework. In our study, we quickly grokked that programmed instruction was a dead end (at least in this century) and proceeded to design what we thought would be USEFUL tools to support educators and the instructional process. IBM didn't want to hear it. In the years since, they've started to dis- tribute some of our project reports as supporting their decision to back away from this kind o thing. Of course, they won't tell you that because they still've got some Infowindow configurations to sell. For any who are interested, our ideas have been implemented via a start-up and willbe released shortly as "OPTIMUS, The Teaching Infor- mation System". If you're interested, get back to me.... -- Russell Shackelford School of Information and Computer Science Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332 russ@prism.gatech.edu (404) 834-4759