Multimedia is Here! (As if You Hadn't Noticed)

Multimedia is exciting new technology that can educate the TV-drenched generation like nothing else on earth. Multimedia is also a fashionable buzzword on which many companies would like to get rich. Yes, there is a lot of hype. But there is substance, too.

Although the enormous promise of multimedia and networks in education won't be realized for several years, the technology is progressing rapidly and there is much that is useful today. In this issue, we have articles by a variety of UIC experts on what multimedia is and what one can reasonably do with it. We hope to encourage you to look into the possibilities, but to also give you a realistic notion of what results you can expect and what needs to be done to achieve them.

Multimedia, the combination of graphics, text, video, sound, and user interaction, strikes us as similar to early word processors, or worse, to desktop publishing systems. It is quite true that these products make it very easy to move words around, to change fonts, to add clip-art, to insert a graph -- in short, to add PIZZAZZ. They can make the writing process easier and the finished product more attractive, but they don't write the words.

There is no software intelligent enough to transform illiterate ramblings into Hemingway, or even into an intelligible memo. Yet word processors are essential nowadays precisely because they can, with forethought, produce effective documents with a small amount of fuss.

Similarly, multimedia has benefits that can no longer be ignored. It can produce cost-effective education and -- particularly in combination with high speed networks -- distance learning, in ways that can't be duplicated. It will fundamentally change the way students and teachers interact, and will force us to reexamine the most effective roles of live teachers in limited-resource environments.

Multimedia is naturally more complicated than word processing. To be successful with it requires good knowledge of the technology and a clear focus on your educational goal. Given the pace of technology today, it's not too early to learn about its capabilities, and to use multimedia where it fits well in the educational scheme. It certainly won't replace competent teachers anytime soon. But over the next five to ten years, it does promise to let human teachers do more thinking and less tedious work, and to give students better access to a larger variety of learning tools.

Of course, this process is just barely beginning -- big changes will be gradual, and next year's classes will be taught pretty much like this year's. Fads will grow and decay, but in the long run, the technology will be too powerful and too cheap to ignore. And to understand these long-term trends, one must start by understanding the capabilities of the current technology.

The authors of the articles in this issue reflect the multidisciplinary nature of education. Ed Garay is the Computer Center staff member most knowledgeable about display technologies; he writes about software capabilities. Tom Jevec is the librarian who manages the InfoTech Arcade; he writes about its facilities and how it's being used by the UIC community. Donna Rubinson is an instructional design consultant with Office of Media Services and her department's REACH representative; her articles focus on the design process and on finding the best way to accomplish an educational goal. And Ulric Chung is a professor in Pharmacy Practice who actually builds multimedia applications and is a REACHer, too; he gives a case study of a project to build a high-quality multimedia product for low cost. (To save you the suspense, it can be done!)