Subject: Multimedia Teaching About AIDS Date: Published: 10/21/91 (293 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Technology (A Special Report) --- Readin', Writin' & Multimedia: Slowly, Teachers Are Turning to a New Tool ---- By Stephen Kreider Yoder MULTIMEDIA IS FINALLY inching its way into the classroom. Across the nation this fall a smattering of teachers, many for the first time, will use some form of multimedia -- the computer setups that can mix ingredients such as video clips, recorded speeches, music, computer graphics and text. Italian-language students at Dartmouth College, for example, will face a new language-lab instructor, an Apple Macintosh plugged into a laser-disk machine that plays vignettes from Italian television. While watching, say, a stand-up routine by the popular Italian comedian Toto on a TV screen, a student can punch up the synchronized text on the Mac's display and get the computer to define tricky words, provide an English translation, or give a cultural commentary. In El Paso, Texas, elementary-school teachers began the year without a science text. Instead, they present lessons on large-screen television sets, picking photos and video clips from a set of laser disks the state has approved as a "textbook." And at Yale New Haven Hospital, medical residents are learning to identify heart ailments by first taking drills from a computer that juxtaposes an animated heart on a computer screen with video clips of real, ailing hearts on a TV set. "We're just in the beginning phase of going ballistic in the adoption of multimedia technologies" in schools, says Douglas Doyle, manager for higher-education marketing at Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, Calif. Though multimedia setups are still rare in the nation's classrooms, growing numbers of schools are using multimedia software to supplement lessons and to drill students. Teachers who use multimedia, and companies that sell it, are convinced that such systems will soon be as commonplace as the blackboard. "This is not a fad," says Geoffrey Fletcher, an assistant commissioner in Texas's education agency. "This is a trend." Even the most ardent multimedia fans concede that sticky issues are slowing multimedia's advance in education. Equipment is often expensive, and many teachers still balk at learning the technology. The absence of a single standard for equipment means a given program probably won't run on every school's machinery. Software makers are bogged down by the copyrights they must pin down for the thousands of images they put on a typical disk. Still, many schools, despite shrinking budgets, appear increasingly eager to bring multimedia into classrooms. The state of California, where many districts are laying off teachers this year, is negotiating with a unit of New York-based Capital Cities/ABC Inc. to put ABC's multimedia software in all the state's public secondary schools to teach about AIDS and drugs. The financing would come from federal drug-prevention money, not state coffers. Florida has established special funds to put multimedia machines in all its public secondary schools this year, and the Texas legislature has earmarked $30 annually per student for technology, starting next year, much of which is expected to go toward multimedia setups. "There's a wave of realization across the country," says Nelson Heller, publisher of the Heller Report on Educational Technology and Telecommunications Markets, "that if kids aren't technologically ready they're going to miss the boat, the country's going to miss the boat, ...that somehow we've got to make these resources available." The appeal of multimedia for the teacher is simple and compelling. A single computer can edit and display the resources that a teacher must now painstakingly get from dozens of sources: filmstrips, videotapes, atlases, history books, dictionaries and annotated texts. A typical multimedia program puts scores of such materials on one laser disk, from which a computer can pull out and chain together what's needed. At Stanford University, for example, students of Larry Friedlander, an English professor, study Shakespearean plays on their own, using a personal computer tied to a laser-disk player and a TV screen. In an exercise to compare interpretations of "Hamlet," students pull up the play's text on the computer screen. With a click of the computer's "mouse" pointing device, the TV screen displays Laurence Olivier's performance of a scene. With another click, the screen switches to the scene as played by a Russian actor. Other mouse clicks produce annotations and word definitions, and students can type notes or record comments that are synchronized with the video. Another part of the program allows students to play director by moving around animated actors on the computer screen. "Until multimedia came along, there was no way to bring together all these visuals," says Prof. Friedlander. While multimedia's critics say it's a flash in the pan, supporters such as Prof. Friedlander say it will sweep schools because it is fundamentally different from earlier, ill-fated attempts by schools to use "computer-assisted learning" programs. Those programs tried to mimic the entire teaching process but were rejected as dull and mechanical. Multimedia's proponents say it doesn't replace the instructor but instead becomes a supplemental fixture; it brings together the functions of older devices such as projectors and record players, and can also take over tasks that aren't an efficient use of the instructor's time. That's what C. Carl Jaffe, a professor of diagnostic radiology at Yale University's medical school, found. Every month a new resident arrives at the hospital for a stint under Dr. Jaffe. Every month, Dr. Jaffe says, he used to spend precious time standing over the new resident's shoulder while the neophyte learned to interpret the fuzzy video images of ailing hearts generated by an ultrasound machine. "My time was very inefficiently used because I repeated myself every month," says Dr. Jaffe. He decided to let multimedia do the work. He had a laser disk custom-pressed with some 1,800 several-second video images of beating, abnormal hearts. With the help of a Yale computer expert, he created a program for a Macintosh that displays an animated version of the heart that appears on the computer screen. The resident clicks the mouse on to choose, for instance, "coronary artery disease" from a list to see the animated heart along with a real, diseased heart. Clicking the mouse on a stethoscope symbol produces the recorded sound of the troubled heart. After a session, a test built into the system requires the resident to name diseases from unidentified video clips. Now, when new residents arrive, "I tell them to see the computer and come back to me when they can talk my language," says Dr. Jaffe. Another payback from multimedia is that it grabs the short attention span of the Nintendo-and-MTV generation. "You show kids a movie, and they won't pay attention. After five minutes their minds wander to `Ah, what's my boyfriend doing?'" says Dianne Douglas, a high-school health teacher in Lake Worth, Fla. She says students are more attentive to her lessons on AIDS, sex and drugs now that she uses a set of multimedia disks on the topics. "The students who watch this sit totally spellbound." Using the AIDS disk, a product of the ABC News division of Capital Cities/ABC, she uses a PC to chain together video clips from ABC's archives, including shots of drug addicts sharing needles and interviews with AIDS victims. The disk is compelling, she says, because she can intersperse explanations and class discussions with video clips, answering questions by instantly retrieving other video clips. Students' test scores have improved from the time that she relied on lectures and textbooks, Ms. Douglas says. Florida's education department was so impressed by the AIDS disk's impact that it plans to put the disks in every secondary school. And it helped ABC News assemble another disk, on the rise and fall of communism, from which it will gain royalties on sales. Companies such as ABC see in multimedia a chance to squeeze extra profits out of huge archives of video, audio and text. Enclyopaedia Britannica Inc. of Chicago has put its entire Compton's Encyclopedia on a compact disk, allowing a student to navigate through the electronic encyclopedia on a PC screen, jumping from one topic to a cross-referenced topic with a click of the mouse, or to dozens of video clips, speeches and music scores. "It's another market out there for the material we have in our library," says William Lord, vice president of ABC News Interactive, the ABC division in charge of multimedia. Computer companies likewise see huge potential. Apple Computer, Tandy Corp. and other PC makers are heavily marketing their machines for multimedia uses in schools, and Apple recently unveiled a software architecture tailored to multimedia use. Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., has set up an entire division to develop and market multimedia technology. "Education is a relatively untapped market," says Robert Glaser, who manages the new Microsoft division. "We're optimistic that the next 12 months will be a launching point for this. If we're successful in getting the PC to be more than just a productivity thing, there are lots of benefits to us." The equipment needed to run multimedia applications is certainly increasing. CD-ROM drives -- which play 4.75-inch disks -- were in 1,377 of the nation's approximately 15,000 public-school districts last school year, up 70% from the previous year, according to Quality Education Data Inc., a Denver-based research firm. And 1,273 districts, up 38%, used laser-disk players -- which play 12-inch disks. Schools' use of laser and CD-ROM players will more than double this school year, the firm predicts. Optical Data Corp. of Warren, N. J., which designs and distributes multimedia disks, says its disks are in nearly 10% of the nation's 100,000 schools. But before computer companies can rake in multimedia profits, they must agree on a standard. Without a standard for what equipment constitutes multimedia, makers of the software are likely to be leery of putting together software that is limited to one setup. "You build platforms of Macs and PCs and somebody else's optical drive," says Ralph Gorin, who oversees Stanford University's multimedia efforts. "Then you discover you have one of a kind and discover no one has anything that works with it." It doesn't help that computer companies are battling over standards. About a dozen companies have rallied around Microsoft's "MPC" standard, which determines what kind of hardware and software a computer must have. International Business Machines Corp. and Apple have decided to join another group that Microsoft doesn't dominate. Another hurdle: Like personal computers in the 1970s, multimedia is a largely unknown quantity and teachers are often reluctant to learn to use it. "There's widespread skepticism, in some quarters there's hostility, people muttering about how we should be spending our money on other things," says Stanford's Mr. Gorin. "But then, in 1981 there were a lot of faculty who thought we were spending too much money on computing." The San Francisco public schools installed 17 multimedia systems in 1989 with social studies and history software from the National Geographic Society. But by the end of the school year more than half of the machines were sitting unused, says Samuel Dederian, who manages the schools' computers. The problem was that teachers hadn't been taught how to work multimedia into their lesson plans. A training program got teachers using them, and by this spring all but two were being used, Mr. Dederian says. "Schools are just beginning to find out what the power of multimedia is," says Judy Saltpeter, managing editor of Technology and Learning, a magazine published in San Rafael, Calif. "But teachers are already overworked and don't have time to get up to speed on it." Some schools have discovered a more practical problem. The school districts around Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last year bought several multimedia systems along with Compton's CD-ROM encyclopedia, which costs $695, or about $150 more than schools pay for the 26-volume conventional set. Students are so delighted with the setup that "they start queuing up to use it," says Clifford Ehlinger, executive director of media for the area's education agency. Therein lies a problem in replacing reference books with computers, he says. Many students can use a traditional set of encyclopedias at once, but with one computer running a multimedia disk at the same price, "if a teacher assigns a report and sends a class of 20 down to the library, you've got a problem." The biggest nightmare for developers of multimedia software is the maze of copyrights for the sometimes tens of thousands of images put on a disk. AND Communication Inc., a Los Angeles software firm that has developed five multimedia programs with IBM -- including disks on Martin Luther King and the Declaration of Independence -- was forced to shoot new footage of some interviews with experts because the copyright holders of existing recordings wouldn't agree to sell the rights. Stanford's Prof. Friedlander says his efforts to get the multimedia rights to Shakespearean performances have been very frustrating. A movie company that owns a recording wanted to charge $4,000 a minute for the rights; another, Sony Corp. 's Columbia Pictures unit, refused to even talk about selling the rights to a "Hamlet" production in its archives, he says. He has given up on getting rights to many of the British Broadcasting Corp. 's acclaimed Shakespeare videos because the BBC hadn't obtained the multimedia rights in the early 1980s, meaning that every actor, director or musician has legal copyrights. "You need squadrons of lawyers to go out and negotiate copyright issues," says Walter Stephens, a Dartmouth Italian-language professor, who adds that the copyright problem will discourage many universities from selling their multimedia programs, thus preventing them from recouping development costs and slowing the spread of multimedia. Developers say future multimedia programs will be even more compelling. As powerful computers become cheaper, developers expect, for example, to produce programs such as a computerized Gray's anatomy that will allow a student to "dissect" what appears to be a three-dimensional human body on the computer screen. Others talk of assembling vast catalogs of disks containing virtually all recorded material on a topic. Stanford's Prof. Friedlander is pushing to put together a database of performances of all Shakespeare's plays. And as optical disks are designed to hold more data, says an Encyclopaedia Britannica official, electronic encyclopedias will include thousands -- instead of dozens -- of speeches and video clips. Ultimately, multimedia's backers say, computers in schools and universities will tap into huge libraries of video images and sound recordings through fiber-optic cables. But even the staunchest supporters are leery of predicting that multimedia will become mainstream soon. Says Prof. Friedlander: "For eight years now we've been saying next year is the year this is going to happen." --- Mr. Yoder is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau. [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]