Distributed Multimedia Learning Environments: Why and How?

We outline the societal prospects and business opportunities for much more extensive use of interactive multimedia technologies (IMT) connected through telecommunications to create distributed multimedia learning environments (DMLE). A theoretical framework is provided with a distinctive communications perspective on learning emerging from research in the cognitive and social sciences. A major consequence of this communication emphasis is the special need for rich communication technologies to support highly interactive teaching and learning activities, especially those at a distance but even within a classroom or school. Examples of existing projects using IMT for remote learning communications are among the most dramatic examples of these new possibilities. Based on these foundations, we first depict a vision of IMT for schools that establishes the kinds of DMLE designs that appear from research to offer promising improvements. We then characterize how current educational spending trends and educational technology research and development attitudes could be transformed so that such distributed multimedia learning environments could become a reality more rapidly. Short-term progress in closing the gap from current practices to this vision is possible in specific IMT application areas described. The first author gratefully acknowledges the support of National Science Foundation Grant MDR88-55582 in work related to this report. Aspects of the framework for describing the contributions of learning research were first developed in Pea and Soloway (1987). Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Roy D. Pea, Northwestern University, Institute for the Learning Sciences, 1890 Maple Avenue, Evanston, IL 60201 (pea@~ils.nwu.edu). INTRODUCTION This paper examines the prospects for learning and education of what we refer to as "interactive multimedia technology," or IMT. Our emphasis will be on telecommunication-centered, not individual-user IMT, for the creation of distributed multimedia learning environments (DMLE). Distributed multimedia learning environments extend the teaching, learning, and material resources beyond individual classrooms. The information network is an integral part of our definition of the basic IMT structure for education because of: the emerging communicationcentered theoretical perspective on learning we will describe; person-to-person IMT communication needs; and the media storagelaccess needs of IMT multimedia information. One cannot do even classroom-scale local storage on floppy disks, hard disks, or optical media of the extensive video, audio, graphic, and text materials needed for learning and teaching. We believe that new developments in theories of learning and collaborative work make robust interactive communications such an integral component of the IMT requirements of the future that telecommunications technologies are central to the achievement of a learning society that can meet the demands of education and training during the next century. These theories have communication at their center, and they are based on interactive models of learner and teacher engagement in inquiry around activities such as design and real problem solving, rather than the dominant didactic model of the teacher as a "delivery" agent of knowledge through curriculum materials. Education and training concerns, we argue, are thus squarely in the telecommunications business. We are going to review a broad variety of technological experiments underway with multimedia computing and telecommunications tools that exemplify current trends. While in the spirit of constructive critique, we will time and INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS Vol. 2 , Issue (2), 73-109 (1992) again point out the limitations of these prior works; of course, we recognize that without the imaginative contributions that led to their creation, our own imaginations for what could be the IMT of the future would not be possible or as rich.