Multimedia environments suggest to us a new perception of the state of changes in and the integration of new technologies that can increase our ability to process information. Moreover, they are obliging us to change our idea of knowledge. These changes are reflected in the obvious synergetic convergence of different types of access, communication and information exchange. The multimedia learning environment should not represent a passive object that only contains or assembles information but should become, on one side, the communication medium of the pedagogical intentions of the professor/designer and, on the other side, the place where the learner reflects and where he or she can play with, test and access information and try to interpret it, manipulate it and build new knowledge. The situation created by such a new learning environments that give new powers to individuals, particularly with regard to accessing and handling diversified dimensions of information, is becoming increasingly prevalent in the field of education. The old static equilibrium, in which fixed roles are played by the teacher (including the teaching environment) and the learner, is shifting to dynamic eqUilibrium where the nature of information and its processing change, depending on the situation, the learning context and the individual's needs.

Inhalt

1. Multimedia Learning Environment: A New Paradigm?.- Learning in the Twenty-First Century Interactive Multimedia Technology.- Research and Theory on Multi-Media Learning Effects.- A Design Method for Classroom Instruction in the Multimedia Environment.- Multimedia Learning Environment: An Educational Challenge.- 2. Interface Design: Issues and New Conceptual Models.- Interactivity and Intelligent Advisory Strategies in a Multimedia Learning Environment: Human Factors, Design Issues and Technical Considerations.- Integrating HyperMedia into Intelligent Tutoring.- Instructional Transaction Theory: Resource Mediations.- Enhancing the Acceptance and Cultural Validity of Interactive Multi-Media.- Contextual Browsing Within a Hypermedia Environment.- Hypertext's Contribution to Computer-Mediated Communication. In Search of an Instructional Model.- 3. Object Oriented Interface Design.- An Object Oriented Approach to Hypermedia Authoring.- Manipulable Inter-Medium Encoding and Learning (An Extended Abstract).- Interactive Instruction: Evolution, Convolution, Revolution.- 4. Multimedia Learning Projects: Applications.- Interactive Learning Using a Videodisc Connected to a Computer Review of Seven Prototypes.- Discussions on Two Multimedia R & D Projects: The Palenque Project and the Interactive Video Project of the Museum Education Consortium.- Some Techno-Human Factors in Interactive Video Based Language Learning.- Audiovisual, Spoken and Written Languages: An Interacting Trilogy for the Teaching of Foreign Languages in an Interactive Multimedia System.- Interactive Language Learning: A Multimedia Approach in Chile.- The Technological Text: Hypertextual, Hypermedial and Didactic Applications.- The Training of Primary and Secondary School Teachers in Hypertext: Analysis of an Experience.- Training Drivers to Detect Visual Indicators or The Trials and Tribulations of the Uninitiated in Interactive Video.- Learner Control Versus Computer Control in a Professional Training Context.- Author Index.