SceneBeans: A Tool for Constructing Collaborative Multimedia Learning Objects

Abstract

Interactive multimedia elements allow information to bepresented in a comprehensible format, attuned to the waythe students' minds work. Unfortunately, the actualprofit of the resulting learning systems is largelyreduced by poorly represented interactive objects as wellas poor interlinking between such objects. In particular,such objects appear isolated: they neither can bemodified sufficiently (e.g. by choosing parameters orenhancing functionality) nor be interlinked properly withtheir context (e.g. by synchronizing with a guided touror metadata). Innovative enabling technologies like XMLand wireless communication may for the first time providea facility to interact with online applications anytimeanywhere. In this article, we are presenting a prototypeimplementing a collaborative multimedia objects based onSceneBeans. The structure and behavior of the multimedialearning objects is described in XML using ScenBeans andhence requires no programming experience. The prototypeillustrates our vision of linking such multimedialearning objects to a major learning object repository.