From Multimedia Micro-University to Macro University and beyond

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Abstract

For this special issue of the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing in honor of Prof. Shi-Kuo Chang we review Prof. Chang's research contributions to the field of education. Always visionary and inspirational, these works reflect Prof. Chang's student-centered approach and his interest in building relationships among international educators in order to bring the benefits of such collaborations among educators to the students while keeping in mind the motto “Small is beautiful”.

Introduction

Prof. Shi-Kuo Chang is best known to the research community for his contributions to the fields of visual language and image database systems – including starting the first scientific conference on visual languages and founding the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing. He has made major contributions to many other areas however, and, in particular, as part of his long career as an educator – more than 35 years as a professor of computer science in U.S. universities including terms of service as Chair of department at both Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Pittsburgh – education has long been an area of interest. He has performed research with education as the central topic as well as applying his research results from other areas in the education domain. Those of us who have been his students and collaborators know Prof. Chang's passion for education and we might point to his founding of the Knowledge Systems Institute (KSI) as an institution for teaching graduate level computer science using the principles he holds dear – the personal touch and the introduction of students to cutting-edge research, encouraging them to get involved in the same.

In looking at the corpus of Prof. Chang's research in the field of education, a couple of themes shine through – first enabling the means to build international collaborations in teaching and research which will benefit students by exposing them to multiple points of view and emphases from international experts in their chosen field of specialization. This theme, which was evident more than 30 years ago when Prof. Chang brought together a group of researchers from many countries to collaborate in research in visual languages at the early visual languages conferences, is increasingly important in todays diverse and globalized education environments. Second, while wanting to leverage the possibilities brought about by the rise of the Internet and distance education, Prof. Chang has always been concerned not to lose sight of the individual student in this online environment, thus providing a customized and personalized learning experience is necessary in order that the student not be overwhelmed and in order to stick to Prof. Chang's education motto “Small is beautiful”. Of course, as one of the pioneers of research in the area of visual languages, the themes of visual interfaces, multimedia, and visual languages and grammars are all interwoven in the research in learning carried out by Prof. Chang.

In the rest of this paper we will provide an overview (not exhaustive) of Prof. Chang's research work in the education area, at times indicating how subsequent developments have vindicated the previous research, while at other times technology has driven practice in somewhat different directions, we will show how the parts fit together, and we will conclude with suggestions for further research in this area inspired by Prof. Chang's work.

Section snippets

Multimedia Micro-University

From his earliest research, Prof. Chang has shown an interest in how computer technology can improve education (two of these early efforts are [1], [2]). The first of his education research efforts in the modern Internet age concerned what he termed a Multimedia Micro-University (MMU) [3]. The Multimedia Micro-University is built-on the tele-action object (TAO) formalism [4]. TAOs in turn build on the active index formalism [5], where an active index consists of a number of index cells (ICs).

Macro University

Following the successful introduction of the Multimedia Micro-University, the vision was extended from a single institution to a federation of universities in order to provide the best opportunities for learning and research for students by exposing them to an international array of experts.

Technical and financial considerations in the late 1990s led many academic institutions to set up a web site and start a distance learning program on the Internet. Coupled with a digital library, many

The Growing Book

The Macro University project was a model for combining the educational resources from a large number of academic institutions, thus creating a rich learning environment. The project was built on the formerly proposed Multimedia Micro-University concept (Macro University was a collection of Micro-Universities). The next step in the evolution of this model was the Growing Book – a Growing Book is just a specialized type of Micro-University which will be described in this section.

Without losing

Transformation of distance learning materials

The previous section described a Growing Book which is created by an international team or teachers and which has the goal of being multi-level, multi-lingual, and multi-modal – in other words, the Growing Book should support rich personalization for the needs of particular students. The MAWC operations on the Growing Book are the means to achieve this customization and can be implemented as commands for the customized IC manager. In this section we look at how those operations by the IC

Active index for e-Learning

The active index has already been encountered in research described in the previous sections, both through the index cells which make up part of the TAOs (which in turn are the underlying formalism of the Micro-University/Growing Book) and as a standalone component. The research described in this section takes a more in depth look at how an active index can be integrated with an e-learning system incorporating mobile communications, sensor networks and search engines in order to form a

Chronobot

The last of Prof. Chang's research projects to be surveyed – the Chronobot/Virtual Classroom (CVC) [30] – takes a somewhat different approach than the previous ones, though the techniques can be incorporated into the Macro University/Growing Book framework.

The chronobot is a device for storing and borrowing time [31]. The underlying premise of the chronobot is that there is a device for exchanging knowledge and time. For example, one can spend some time now to acquire knowledge and later use

Conclusions and future directions

The following table documents the use of several technologies developed by Prof. Chang and his colleagues and their usage in the major projects described in this paper (Table 1).

The relationship between some of the different entities introduced by Prof. Chang and used in the works surveyed in this paper are shown in the E-R diagram in Fig. 3.

As is evident in this paper, Prof. Chang has been a pioneer in the area of education, distance learning, and virtual universities. We have surveyed most of

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