Larry Johnson has been the CEO of the New Media Consortium (NMC) for nearly a decade, and he has worked in higher education for more than twenty-five years. Before joining NMC, he served in roles that include faculty member, dean, provost, and president. In this interview, he talks about the position of NMC in distance education and the challenges…

Remote experimentation laboratories (REL) are systems based on real equipment that allow students to carry out a laboratory practice through the Internet on the computer. In engineering, there have been numerous initiatives to implement REL over recent years, given the fundamental role of laboratory activities. However, in the past efforts have…

Many e-learning service systems fail. This is particularly true for those sponsored by joint industry/university consortia where substantial economic investments are required up-front. This article provides an industry/university consortia reference model validated through experiences with the 8-year-old Teradata University Network. The reference…

Social and mobile technologies offer users unprecedented opportunities for communicating, interacting, sharing, meaning-making, content and context generation. And, these affordances are in constant flux driven by a powerful interplay between technological innovation and emerging cultural practices. Significantly, also, they are starting to…

The concept of today's cloud computing may date back to 1961, when John McCarthy, retired Stanford professor and Turing Award winner, delivered a speech at MIT's Centennial. In that speech, he predicted that in the future, computing would become a "public utility." Yet for colleges and universities, the recent growth of pervasive, very high speed…

Describes the development and production of an interactive multimedia resource on twentieth-century artist, Constatin Brancusi, by an international consortium of art museums, art historians, and technical partners. Topics discussed include technical issues, such as hardware and software; design considerations; international cooperation; and…

The DIN Didactical Object Model extends the approaches of existing Educational Modeling Languages introducing specifications for contexts and experiences. In this paper, we show how the Didactical Object Model can be used for sharing didactical expertise. Educational Modeling Languages change the design paradigm from content orientation towards…

Discussion of distributed multimedia visualization focuses on projects being developed through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Educational Computing Initiatives and the AthenaMuse Software Consortium. Highlights include authoring environments; multimedia network services; distance education; multilingual materials;…