Title: Educational Infrastructure
Performer(s):
David Garlan
Carnegie Mellon University
Mary Shaw
Carnegie Mellon University
Jeanette Wing
Carnegie Mellon University
|
Cluster: SNAIR
Contact Information:
Phone: 412-268-5056
Fax: 412-268-5576
email: david.garlan@cs.cmu.edu
Phone: 412-268-2589
email: mary.shaw@cs.cmu.edu
Phone: 412-268-3068
email: wing@cs.cmu.edu
|
1. Instructional Focus:
Content areas/topics: All areas
Process skills: Course and curriculum development, instructional presentation.
2. Target Population: Teachers in K-12, University, and Adult Education and Training who develop course materials.
3. Summary Description: This product is a server that provides a set of converters between different data types. The common data types include different document and file formats, e.g., Word documents, PowerPoint documents, postscript files, and html files, that are often used by teachers and students in preparing lecture notes, assignments, and homework. The converters include programs that convert a document of one data type to a document of another, with the expectation or intention that it will be easier to read, print, or view the converted document. The server will also provide some automatic help to the end-user, applying the appropriate converter given an input document and the desired format of the output document. The difficult problem of heterogeneous hardware platforms are being addressed.
This server is part of a larger infrastructure that provides a suite of software tools that are generic versions of today's ad hoc solutions for putting heterogeneous, independently developed, software components together. These ad hoc solutions include converters, data interchange formatters, wrappers, filters, and adaptors
4. Training and Staff Development:
- Teacher prerequisite skills/knowledge needed: Familiarity with the basic operation of WWW browsers, document preparation systems, e.g., Word or PowerPoint.
- Student prerequisite skills/needed: Familiarity with the basic operation of WWW browsers. We do not anticipate students will need to interact with our type converter server directly.
- Training needed/provided: Not much training is needed if the person is familiar with the basic operation of WWW browsers; however, short "hands-on" training could be provided if necessary. A user's guide for how to interact with the converter will be provided.
- Technical Support needed/provided: Initially, the ability to establish network connections to this type converter server. Initialization templates and guidelines will be provided.
5. Technological/Resources Needed: Standard WWW clients and servers on PC and workstations.
6. Intended Outcomes:
Students: Students will be able to browse a course on-line through the WWW.
Teachers: Teachers will be able to create documents and other course materials using the most appropriate software package, e.g., Word or PowerPoint, and use our type converter to convert these documents so they are displayable on-line through a WWW browser.
7. Instructional Time Needed: We are intentionally designing an interface to this type converter server so that very little instructional time will be needed to learn to this our tool.
8. Role of the Pilot Teacher(s): Pilot teachers will incorporate their course materials from multiple document preparation sources and present them via a WWW client.
9. Example of the Use of this Product (Scenario):
Example One
Instructors use PowerPoint on a PC to prepare course content material as PowerPoint slides; students would like to peruse those slides on a PC through Netscape either as part of preparing homework assignments in class or from home. In order for this scenario to occur we need a PowerPoint-to-html converter. Our type converter server will have stored such converters. It will also automatically invoke this PowerPoint-to-html converter knowing that the student is running Netscape and wants to display the PowerPoint slides. Right now, to do it takes manual intervention, knowledge of intermediate converters (e.g., saving PowerPoint as a postscript file), manual file transfers (from one file system to another), etc.; with our type converter server, everything is automatic and done without the user's need to know.
Example Two
A CAETI pilot teacher receives on their PC an email message that has embedded in it two unreadable maps to a CAETI training session. These maps are represented in an intermediate image format not supported on the teacher's PC. Our type converter server will be able to run several converters (on the appropriate platforms) so that the two maps can be extracted and individually printed on a laserwriter. These converters need (1) to break the file into two separate files, (2) to transfer to a computer that understands the intermediate image format, (3) to convert to a format requested by the teacher, and (4) to send each readable/displayable map to a printer. Again, the advantage is that the presence of the type converter server enables the user to effect this conversion completely automatically without any knowledge of the intermediate steps.
