Audiographics in Transition: Changing Technologies and Patterns of Usage
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Education and Information Technologies 1 21–41 (1996) 1111 2 3 4 5 6 Audiographics in transition: changing 7 8 technologies and patterns of usage 9 10111 1 ALLAN ELLIS 2 Faculty of Education, Work and Training, Southern Cross University, PO Box 3 157, Lismore, NSW 2480, Australia. 4 E-mail: [email protected] 5 World Wide Web: http://www.scu.edu.au/ 6 7 ROGER DEBRECENY 8 Faculty of Business and Computing, Southern Cross University, PO Box 157, 9 Lismore, NSW 2480, Australia. 20111 E-mail: [email protected] 1 World Wide Web: http://www.scu.edu.au/anet/people/RogerD.html 2 3 ROBERT CRAGO 4 Revelation Computing Pty Ltd, PO Box 356, Zillmere, Queensland 4034, Australia. 5 E-mail: [email protected] 6 World Wide Web: http://www.powerpu.com.au/~revcom 7 8 9 30111 1 This paper discusses the development and use of an audiographics program, 2 Electronic Classroom®, at all levels of Australian education and analyses the 3 manner in which the rapid improvements in computing performance have 4 allowed the technology to meet the needs of users from new areas of the 5 curriculum; illustrates the usage of the product in a variety of educational 6 settings by pointing to a number of case studies; discusses the educational strate- 7 gies used by teachers in their use of audiographics and makes conclusions on 8 the role of audiographics in education. 9 KEYWORDS: distance education; computer assisted instruction; tele-teaching. 40111 1 2 INTRODUCTION 3 4 Audiographics has been variously defined, but in the context of this paper refers to 5 the linking of a number of educational sites into a ‘distributed’ classroom by a com- 6 bined voice circuit usually using telephone connections over the public switched 71111 telephone network, PSTN (‘audio’) and linked computers (‘graphics’) at those sites. 1360–2357 © 1996 Chapman & Hall 22 Ellis et al. 1111 Table 1. Selected educational technologies differentiated by 2 temporal and spatial features 3 4 Spatial 5 Temporal Same place Different place 6 7 Synchronous Classroom Audiographics 8 Educational TV & Radio Teletutes 9 10111 Asynchronous E-Mail 1 World Wide Web 2 Real Audio 3 Asynchronous TV 4 5 6 Audiographics is an example of what Bates (1993) calls the ‘remote classroom’ where 7 the teacher is in control and is arguably the ‘source of knowledge’. Table 1 shows 8 the place of audiographics amongst selected educational technologies analysed by 9 temporal and spatial factors. 20111 1 The traditional classroom is conducted synchronously and in a single geographic 2 location, and by its very nature allows for two-way communication between teacher 3 and student. Audiographics is also synchronous, but conducted in different geo- 4 graphic locations; and also allows for two-way communication between teacher and 5 student, both by the shared use of the whiteboard and by the telephone connec- 6 tions. Teletutorials provide asynchronous, different place connectivity, but have no 7 visual element. Both audiographics and teletutorials are designed for relatively 8 small groups working intensively. 9 30111 Educational radio provides a mass synchronous, different place but unidirectional 1 educational experience without visual element. Educational television can provide 2 all of these features but to provide bidirectional communication adds significant 3 technological challenges, and to move to asynchronous television requires formid- 4 able computing and bandwidth capabilities. 5 6 Audiographics is a low cost and relatively low technology solution to a variety of 7 educational problems. At its most simple it requires two relatively low end personal 8 computers equipped with modems and a voice line for oral communication. The 9 personal computers provide a rich shared multimedia workspace. Audiographics 40111 has a low setup cost, is simple to establish and run on a going basis and provides 1 for flexible delivery compared with the more structured nature of print based dis- 2 tance education materials. It relates well to the traditional classroom model and 3 can, therefore, readily be adapted to use in the K12 system (McCullagh and Stacey, 4 1993; Gray and O’Grady, 1993; Oliver and Reeves, 1994), but is also to be found in 5 higher education (Barker and Patrick, 1989) , teacher in-service training (Knapczyk, 6 1992; McCullagh and Stacey, 1993; Stacey, 1995) and staff training environments 71111 (Miller, 1991). Audiographics in transition 23 1111 Audiographics has been most popular in Australia and Canada, with the major 2 audiographics products originating in these countries. Both are very large coun- 3 tries with only relatively small populations. At the same time, they both have highly 4 urbanized communities. This means that many rural areas have very low popula- 5 tion densities; with distances between population centres, many of which have only 6 tiny populations, which would be unthinkable in most other countries. This combi- 7 nation of distance and low population density provides particular educational 8 challenges in the delivery of high quality education at a reasonable cost. 9 10111 The focus of this paper is on the development and usage of an Australian audio- 1 graphic software package, Electronic Classroom®, which runs on the Apple 2 Macintosh platform. The technology has been employed in a variety of educational 3 settings throughout the K12 curriculum in both rural and urban areas and in the 4 technical and university sectors, with more than 1000 sites around Australia now 5 servicing a diverse range of programmes and subject matter. The remainder of 6 this paper analyses the manner in which the rapid improvements in hardware and 7 operating system performance over the five year life of this product period have 8 allowed this educational technology to meet the needs of both the early adopters 9 of the technology as well as providing new tools for users from new areas of the 20111 curriculum; the paper analyses the usage of the product in a variety of educational 1 settings by pointing to a number of case studies, and discusses the educa- 2 tional strategies used by teachers in their use of audiographics and makes some 3 conclusions on the role of audiographics in education. 4 5 DISCUSSION 6 7 Technical developments 8 9 In an educational environment, audiographics as implemented by Electronic Class- 30111 room® allows: 1 2 (1) synchronous communication between teacher and students at a distance at 3 relatively low cost, 4 (2) the remote call up of common files stored on floppies or hard disks and 5 control peripheral devices such as CD-ROM drives, 6 (3) instructions to be issued to remote computers to display movies, and 7 (4) interrelationship of the output of one computer program into the audio- 8 graphic software for transmission to remote computers. 9 40111 The technical history of Electronic Classroom® provides a snapshot of the adap- 1 tation of the educational technology to both changing functionality in computing 2 and communications and to the changing needs of teachers. The design analogy 3 for Electronic Classroom® is that of an electronic equivalent of the standard class- 4 room whiteboard. Information which is ‘written’ on the ‘whiteboard’ by the ‘teacher’ 5 or ‘student’ is reproduced on the screens of the other site(s). Version 1.0 was 6 released in February 1990 and could connect to a maximum of two remote sites. 71111 It offered freehand, text, rectangle, oval and straight line tools and supported one 24 Ellis et al. 1111 Figure 1. A basic link between three sites (Version 1 setup) 2 3 4 brand of modem at 1200/2400 byte s–1. It ran on either Mac Plus or Macintosh 512K 5 and, consequently, only supported a 9” monochrome screen. A typical Version 1 6 setup is illustrated in Fig. 1 with one base and two ‘remote’ Macintoshes commu- 7 nicating by low speed modem and with voice communication by telephone. The 8 first classroom users of Electronic Classroom® were in a number of secondary 9 schools in Victoria and in three central (K10) schools in New South Wales. 10111 1 Version 1.02 came in October 1990 and added dialling features for congested 2 exchanges, as well as the ability to open multiscreen files. Screens are held in 3 random access memory (RAM) on each computer and so it is very quick to switch 4 from screen to screen. Subscripts and superscripts in text were also added to 5 accommodate the needs of mathematics teachers. A ‘buzz’ feature was added, so 6 that students at remote sites could gain the attention of the teacher, meaning that 7 the teacher could ask the remote students a question and, rather than putting up 8 their hands as in a normal classroom, they would ‘buzz’. 9 20111 Versions 1.04 and 1.05 in early January 1991 supported greater than two remote 1 sites via a special multiport serial card in a Macintosh II, this still forms the foun- 2 dation of most multiple sites. Asian language support was added for languages 3 other than English (LOTE) and is now provided by WorldScript. The first Macintosh 4 LCs were making their way into schools, so coloured drawing was added. A new 5 graphic selection capability was added, as was automatic restarting on multi- 6 pointing computers to accommodate dropped telephone lines. 7 8 Key features in the next several maintenance releases added support for more 9 modem types, including for the first 9600 baud modems in schools. Support for 30111 teachers and students to work on screens after the lesson was over was added. 1 This allowed students to review the lesson after its completion. 2 3 Three major releases then took place in the period from August 1992 to July 1994.