NEXT-GENERATION CONTENT REPRESENTATION, CREATION, AND SEARCHING FOR NEW-MEDIA APPLICATIONS IN EDUCATION

Content creation, editing, and searching are extremely time-consuming tasks that often require substantial training and experience, especial ly when high-quality audio and video are involved. ''New media'' repre sents a new paradigm for multimedia information representation and pro cessing, in which the emphasis is placed on the actual content. It thu s brings the tasks of content creation and searching much closer to ac tual users and enables them to be active producers of audio-visual inf ormation rather than passive recipients. We discuss the state of the a rt and present next-generation techniques for content representation, searching, creation, and editing. We discuss our experiences in develo ping a Web-based distributed compressed video editing and searching sy stem (WebClip), a media-representation language (Flavor) and an object -based video-authoring system (Zest) based on it, and a large image/vi deo search engine for the World Wide Web (WebSEEk). We also present a case study of new media applications based on specific planned multime dia education experiments with the above systems in several K-12 schoo ls in Manhattan, NY.