The New World on a Disc : Computers: IBM is testing the waters for video-disc teaching by launching a multimedia history of Christopher Columbus.
There are bitter and sweet ironies in the multimillion-dollar project that Hollywood filmmaker Robert Abel is directing in the back reaches of the empty and once elegant Ambassador Hotel grounds.
The Ambassador is past tense. Abel’s work is emphatically future. He has turned the leased Bungalow H into a central point for an international multimedia history project that began last July.
Abel’s year-old Synapse Technologies, Inc., is producing a major work for schoolchildren on the life and times of Christopher Columbus. It is not a movie or a television show, a documentary or an animation. It is all of those wrapped inside a challenging state-of-the-art project that marries the television camera, laser discs, CD ROMs and the personal computer.
Christopher Columbus is the obvious star of this multiple-video disc production, which is designed to provide up to 280 hours of classroom instruction.
Classroom users interact with the images on their computer screens. They do not follow a “story” so much as make choices on what they want from different menus. The new technologies take the viewers back and forth in time with a range of choices and points of view to experience the art, music, politics, the beliefs and attitudes of, say, Native Americans, or the views of present-day scholars and artists, including a 14th-generation “granddaughter” of the Italian explorer. Columbus is portrayed as neither good nor bad. The material is presented and the viewer makes the decisions.
Abel’s 30 researchers, technicians and assorted media geniuses number about the same that staffed the original Nina. The finished work may never be shown at movie houses--that’s yesterday’s technology. Come October, 1992, and the quincentenary of Columbus’ piercing of the Western horizon, it probably will light up certain computers (today’s technology) all over this country. But it will happen first in American school rooms.
The project, called “Columbus: Discovery and Beyond,” is financed solely by IBM. It is the largest educational multimedia project yet for the computer company, reportedly dwarfing in dollars the highly publicized Columbus projects being readied by film, television and publishing companies. No one is saying how much, but one IBM executive does refer to the project with a certain fiscal awe as “Dances With Abel.”
The American classroom is shaping up as the testing ground for much of the digital and electronic marvels of multimedia projects. IBM may be the biggest player so far in preparing to sell its Columbus software and its necessary hardware (computers, disc players) to school districts.
Others have been out there targeting schools with programs for video players. Apple computer was one of the first to bring out experimental interactive programs and equipment for classroom use. ABC television has a unit that has been putting video-disc versions of its network news programs and specials into classrooms. The Discovery Channel and National Geographic are media companies that in the past few years also have produced video-disc classroom programs.
According to the data base research firm Quality Education Data of Denver, more than 1,000 school districts in the United States now have some form of interactive multimedia equipment and teaching programs. Three years ago, the number was less than 500. The field is so new that little information exists on how effective these computer programs are.
With our education President pushing for more private involvement in school programs, a growing number of American firms are getting involved. On one level, Ted Turner’s CNN and Whittle Communications’ Channel One are highly visible examples of private companies providing equipment and programmed lessons for schools across the country.
On another level is the growing number of schools that are budgeting money for computer equipment and new software programs, especially in health and science education programs ranging from AIDS to teen-age pregnancies.
What Columbus did for the flat Earth theory the computer may be doing for the 3 Rs: jumping off. Any wonder, then, that filmmaker-turned-explorer Robert Abel tends to speak in hyperlatives when he clicks on his Columbus program?
“This is the beginning of a new form of education and entertainment. We have new ways, new delivery systems, new theaters, it’s CD with visuals . . .
“You can now put yourself into a context . . .
“It’s Nintendo with a purpose, a meeting of the video-game crowd with the coffee-table crowd . . .
“Right now we’re drowning in information and don’t know how to think. Multimedia allows us to choose what we want to see and what we want to learn. . . .”
For Abel, Columbus has become a metaphor for 400 years of history.
“We’ve taken a slice of the world 500 years ago and we are trying to show it and relate it to the now and the future. Why did the world change? To understand that we have to reach back to Marco Polo and end with Copernicus. While these interactive programs are aimed at 4th through 12th graders, we are actually moving toward the eventual use of these programs in home computers.
“In the future, we will take other significant chunks of time, the periods of Leonardo, Galileo, Newton.”
As the project evolved, a new software program also evolved. It’s called Concept Engine, which relates ideas to other ideas, never ending, never running out of explanations for ideas.
This month, Abel delivers his work to IBM, which then will enter what its executives call the beta testing--classroom use and whatever follow-up refinements are called for. Next Oct. 15 in Washington, the first public demonstration of the Columbus project will be held.
So far, there have been no market studies, no expensive surveys indicating if there is a need for computer multimedia.
“This is all new to us,” says James Dezell, IBM’s vice president of education systems. “So far we’re guessing what’s out there.”
The “something” out there might be young people whose gamesmanship has made them computer literate. The something out there also might be in the new critical urgency to revamp schools. The something out there might be the billion-dollar education market. The something out there might be the expanding market for video discs, laser discs, computers that interact.
It’s almost like searching for India and finding an unexpected continent.
