Introduction: The Vocabularies of Design
The term "design" signifies different things not only in the different disciplines we're concerned with in CS92, but in different areas within each discipline. In education, for example, "educational design" and "curriculum design" have given rise to separate literatures that use the term quite differently. In computer science, there are different journals devoted to "system design", "program design" and "software design" (not to mention "multimedia design:). Although these various uses of the term "design" may have something in common, articulating that something can lead to terms so vague or ambiguous as to be of little practice use (e.g. "efficiency"). On the other hand, brainstorming about what all these design concerns have in common may make it easier to be clear about what sense(s) of design your project team finds most interesting and compelling.
Today, we'll hear from the TAs about the two authoring tools you're most likely to use this semester: Macromedia's Director; and the programming language Java. Next week, we'll begin reading about interface design (itself a discipline within software design!).
Cards, Scores and Objects
The history of multimedia authoring tools is very different than the history of programming languages, and the reasons aren't difficult to guess. In computer science, the ideal programming language is one that maximizes both control (of the machine) and freedom (of design), whereas in the design of instructional multimedia the ideal tool is one that harnesses the machine's power while allowing the use of human (rather than machine) language to the greatest extent possible. Not surprisingly, while powerful programming languages are as old as your teachers, powerful multimedia authoring tools are only about as the current undergraduates.
Perhaps the earliest popular multimedia authoring tool was Apple's Hypercard, which took the familiar notion of a slide show and gave it the sort of functionality that demonstrated (to some) why digital multimedia might be able to transform instruction in ways that television and film could not. As we look at Hyperstudio, Director and Java today, we'll see that in each case the tool/language takes a familiar concept/abstraction and gives it a kind of multidimensional flexibility that "real" instances of the concept don't have. The results are tools/languages of extraordinary power when coupled with the computer.
Janete Perez, Damien Suttle and Nick Yang will present the tools and languages.
For next week: Read Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface, at least the first half for Tuesday and the rest for Thursday.