About The Golden Age
How might image-rich materials and tools encourage learning? How might new technologies support human expression and investigation? What kind of opportunities do linking capabilities and rich media provide to the learning enterprise, broadly defined? What is the nature of learning with multimedia, and how might organizations collaborate to create and distribute products and tools that support this learning?
During its brief five-year existence (1987 – 1992) the Apple Multimedia Lab completed more than 40 projects, 6 commercial products, 25 documentary video tapes, and 20 technical reports to address just these questions.
This current product archives many of these contributions, bringing them “out of my closet” and into the light of the day.
One audience for this archive is Apple Computer, Inc., who is interested in developing a website from these materials to demonstrate to current audiences its leadership in research 20 years ago.
A second audience is students in Stanford University’s EDUC 106 Course: Interactive Media in Education. I taught this class in winter 2008, using many of these materials. This archive can serve as a “textbook” for this class in 2009.
Another audience is the Marin Learning Conservancy, an umbrella organization in Marin County (in the San Francisco Bay Area) which I have established casually, to bring together local teachers, parents, and learning organizations to advance learning for youth. In conjunction with the Marin County Office of Education (MCOE) and the George Lucas Education Foundation (GLEF),the Marin Learning Conservancy will initiate a lecture series in 2009 which will examine these materials in some detail. It will be a follow-on to the work of the New Media Thinking project which I completed in 2006.
Another audience is the New Media Consortium (NMC), a membership organization of more than 200 universities and museums, which has continued work in this general area, and where I have served on the board (and am now a NMC Fellow). This organization created Pachyderm, the multimedia authoring tool that was used to create this presentation. It has also generously provided assistance in the production of this product, and is currently hosting it.
Finally, the audience is you. Whoever you are, wherever you are. Whether you are a teacher or a student or a professor or a funder or a policy maker or an administrator or a researcher or a parent or some combination of these and more, think about how these ideas might be relevant to what you are doing today. Take whatever ideas and demonstrations you want and bring them into the light of the new day. Use them to help develop even newer ideas about learning, and learning with new technologies in our changing world. The challenges are broad. It takes many of us doing many different things to realize the dream of equitable access to healthy learning experiences for all.
Thanks.
Kristina Woolsey
February 2009