While looking for some notebooks that I simply can’t find, I came across an old copy of the Canadian Journal of Educational Communication I kept as it contains a paper I co-wrote in 1994 with probably the greatest boss I ever had, Dr. Arto Demirjian, and my then thesis director and now dear friend, Steven Shaw.
This paper, entitled “A Case Study: Development of Interactive Multimedia Courseware“, was a very big deal to me. It was a culmination of a venture I had undertaken in a completely foreign domain, which was actually foreign to most people at the time: interactive self-pace learning.
Back then we called it CBT, or computer-based training. I wonder why my title says Interactive Multimedia Courseware… who knows. These CBTs were first produced to be delivered on… diskettes! Yes diskettes, a great technological advance from… floppy disk. Those under 30 or so… ever wondered what that Save icon is? 😉
Now we would call it elearning.
Anyway, it was a magical time for me, as I was given basically anything I wanted to work with:
- The biggest bad-ass Mac I could find
- Two monitors! …with 256 colors!!!!!
- A PC (which I had to care about as my boss wanted it to be… cross-platform!!!!!)
- An external hard drive with a few hundred megabytes (NOT gigabytes)
- A tape back-up with 8mm cartridges (I think…)
- A lab with 7-8 Macs to test with dentistry students
- And then some…
It was cool! I also had the first digital camera: a Nikon F3 (I think) with a 80 megabytes hard drive attached underneath it… Can’t remember the resolution but it was top notch for the times (probably 1 MB or so). I also got my hands on one of the first digital projector. Actually it was a digital plaque that with put on the… OVERHEAD PROJECTOR!!!!!
I was in heaven!
Anyway… enough reminiscing.
Here’s a link to that paper… page 189… Maybe you’ll smile when you read it. Too bad it’s in black and white, very low quality for the figures and pictures.
Thanks for reading up to here. 🙂
Benoit David's Blog 