25 March, 2004: I presented at a Distance and Flexible Learning Showcase at the University of the South Pacific

Presentation

I gave a summary of my NmInTheSouthPacific project, talking about the process and the output so far. Here is a quick summary

Introduction

This is a one year research and development project that attempts to map learning approaches of the South Pacific to educational multimedia development. Basically, we look at how USP students at the DFL centres approach computers and learning, the sorts of hurdles they face at the centres, so we can create guidelines for developing educational multimedia that truly caters for their particular circumstances.

We have been spending a lot of efforts and funds on educational technology at USP, millions of dollars from Jica, Ausaid, and at the same time have been putting alot of effort into ensuring that our traditional means of teaching at USP are more "Pacific," using local cultural content in the curriculae and considering Pacific learning styles when teaching. However, the equipment, software and development methodologies are coming wholesale from other countries, from Australia, the US, Japan, and it is important that we consider how we can tailor the use of this technology to our region.

Academic Literature Review

I talked about a few of the academic ideas that inspired the project, and skimmed through NmReferences.

Questionnaires

I spoke of how I used visual questionairres ( NmTestingContentDisplay , NmTestingMenuVsInline ) to anchor some of the rather absract academic theories from the readings to specific application in multimedia development.

Site-Visits

A list of the sites visited (NmNauru, NmKiribati, NmMarshalls, NmSolomons, NmLautoka, NmSamoa) and short description of the activities:

• interviews
• questionairres
• usability tests

Recommendations

I mentioned that there were recommendations but that we didn't have time to go into them that night. You can see the current draft recommendations at SohSeminarTwo

Multimedia Production

This was the core of the presentation. I showed some snapshots of the software we are developing and mentioned some of the educational underpinnings for the decisions.

personal note on the pink help bit: way too busy, use a flat broad space instead of pop-up alert boxes for it

Feedback

In retrospect, I should have spoken about my EngineeringDrawing / InsituTraining project:

• trained 14 DFL staff in Macromedia Flash
• developed the first interactive flashg application for DFL use at USP
• distributed this CD to many DFL centres

Also, it would have been good to mention more of the outputs from the NmInTheSouthPacific project, namely:

• Interactive CD to go to all 12 countries serviced by US
• Concise recommendations to go to all 12 countries serviced by USP

and also pointed out that

• this is the first interactive CD to be translated into Pacific languages
• the project is exceptionally student focused; even the multimedia developers working on it are students themselves!

Instead, I over-focused on the production side of one particular project.