Multimedia is a very old human endeavor and curiously, it all started with images, more than 30,000 years ago, painted by prehistoric humans on cave walls.
The Chauvet and Lascaux caves in France have some of the oldest paintings known to man.
Source: Sacred destinations (2009). Lascaux cave painting. Retrieved on April 14, 2009 from http://www.sacred-destinations.com/france/lascaux-caves.htm (public domain)
This was the first technology invented to express and capture not only the world we experienced through our senses, but also our imagination and creativity in a medium that could be shared with others.
Compared to these paintings, written text is quite recent, and it marks the beginning of History, more than 9,000 years ago (that's the reason we call the period before it the prehistory). After stone, papyrus was used in ancient Egypt, then parchment, and later paper, invented in China and brought to Europe in the 12th century.
The 19th century saw great developments in multimedia. From photography to motion pictures, from mass production of paper to the new process of printing images and text on the same page, all of it was invented during this time.
Ironically, it took mankind almost all of the 30,000 years since the paintings on cave walls to get a combination of text, image, sound, and video, all working in the same medium. Motion pictures articulating all of these elements were first watched in the 1920s, with soundtracks, subtitles, and of course pictures—still or moving.
The real revolution started with the advent of computers and the Internet, and later on the World Wide Web in the beginning of the 90s, and economically accessible technology for the masses. And finally, after thousands of years of human history, we (not just an elite few) can now create multimedia easily and share it without great effort. In a way, it's a new era for human imagination, creativity, and expression.
This book is about exploring these new possibilities not only for teachers and educators but also for students and learners for teaching, learning, and imagining in new ways. And of course, we will be using Moodle for all of this.
In this chapter we will cover the following topics:
- Knowing a little bit about the history of multimedia
- Understanding some reasons for using multimedia in Moodle
- Attaching a sound file to a Moodle forum post
- Embedding an online video in a Moodle forum post
- Inserting an image in a Moodle forum post
- Choosing an equipment and software to start creating multimedia
Moodle was built around an idea of learning what happens when a group of people construct things for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings (refer to http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Philosophy).
Moodle makes available many resources (web pages, books, files, links, and so on) and activities (forums, assignments, quizzes, lessons, databases, glossaries, and so on) to support teaching and learning, but what can distinguish working with these from paper and pencil work is the way we explore the possibilities of computers and the Web to articulate multimedia elements with text. Creating these multimedia elements, a very powerful concept too, is not possible using Moodle (it is not in its scope either). So when I am talking about using multimedia in Moodle, I am talking about the creation of multimedia using other kinds of tools, later integrated, discussed, and assessed through Moodle.
Using multimedia in this way can provide more opportunities to a group of teachers and students for the construction of, in this case, multimedia artifacts . We will try to use multimedia not only as a product for better delivery, but also to improve the ways in which students can construct multimedia artifacts.
It is usually said that multimedia can be beneficial for learning, as it can approach diverse learning styles, add interactivity and learner control, reduce the time required to learn, or extend the information presented through different channels. When we talk about multimedia artifacts, we are talking about content; however, I would say that pedagogy is also important. This is why we should also value diverse classroom practices around multimedia rather than just using it exclusively for delivery.
This book was written around the design of an online course called Music for everyday life using Moodle, which is available at http://www.musicforeverydaylife.net. This course is open to everyone (no enrolment key is needed; it has a guest access), so you can share it with colleagues as it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. This gives you a lot of freedom in using and remixing the course's content in your own course.
You might ask, why music? Music, besides being fun and horizontal to all cultures, is a subject that can easily gather contributions from areas such as Science (for example, Waves and Sound), Geography (with instruments from around the world, such as the Ukulele), Languages (music in itself is a language), World History (from medieval music to jazz), or even Social Sciences (the law around creative works). This book was not made for musicians in particular, and one of its main challenges was to reach different educators from different subjects. Music is simply the way to get all of these perspectives working together.