INTERACTIVE EDUCATION - TRANSITIONING CD-ROMS TO THE WEB

CD-ROM publishing of interactive multimedia has generally taken the mo del of the printing press and transferred it into the new digital medi um. Even when presented as interactive multimedia, the content itself is frozen in time and not updatable. This is frustrating since a new C D-ROM becomes old hat as soon as it is pressed. More than a year ago w e integrated most of Jane Goodall's fieldwork amongst the chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, into a CD-ROM title using sound, ima ges, video and text together with an intuitive and explorative interfa ce. In teaching courses with ''Virtual Chimps'' as we called it, we so on discovered that CD-ROMs are an island solution far removed from wha t we envision as a global knowledge system. Until the time when all kn owledge in all media can be accessed over networks, a hybrid system is desirable which makes the transition from CD-ROM published titles to information accessed over networks. We have therefore produced a CD-RO M which contains our software engine to analyze chimpanzee behavior bu t also anchors to the WWW using Mosaic as client. With this configurat ion and linkage to our own fileserver, our CD-ROM works as a hybrid sy stem: it performs customized tasks on a local workstation but is able to interchange and integrate data with other WWW files servers. The ou tput of any analysis can be shared with other users over the WWW and a dditional information gathered world wide can be integrated seamlessly into the system.