Rapid Construction of Learning Resources using Microcosm Pro

Hugh Davis [Electronics and Computer Science and Multicosm Lt

The World Wide Web has caused a revolution in learning and teaching. Using the standard Web, teachers can publish on-line their syllabuses, schemes of work, teaching notes, work sheets, coursework, worked examples, and any other material. And they can use the hypertext features to interconnect these materials and other relevant materials on the Web.

These facilities do not seem to be terribly sophisticated when compared, for example, with the features of a Managed Learning Environment (see article above) and yet the Web has been phenomenally successful. Why? The secret is the universal access. I can put a worksheet onto my server and as soon as I have distributed the URL to my students they can immediately access it. It will not matter what type of hardware they have, or what version of the software they have; it will not matter whether they are on campus or off campus. They will not necessarily even have to login to a University system in order to see the materials and, I, as the teacher can make this information available simply by saving a word processor file as html (hypertext markup language) in the correct place.

However, in spite of the tremendous leap forward allowing users control of their own data, the vanilla Web is nothing more than that; a system to allow users to publish data with some simple interconnectivity provided by the hypertext links.

An Introduction to Open Hypertext
Hypertext systems were first noticed by the teaching and training communities in the late 1980’s and systems such as Guide, Hypercard and Asymetrix Toolbook soon acquired a reputation for allowing relatively naïve computer users to build learning resources. But these systems had their limitations:

• They mostly required the author to have some programming skills to do anything interesting;
  
  
• They required that all data files were converted into some internal format;
  
  
• Since links were only stored inside the actual data files, it wasn’t possible to make links inside read-only materials, such as on a CD-ROM or inside files that belonged to someone else
  
  
• They had no concept of allowing different views of the information for different users;
  
  
• Users could only interact passively with the systems, by clicking buttons. They could not add their own data, links, paths or annotations.
  

As a result of such limitations, when the Technology in Learning and Teaching Programme (TLTP) began in 1992, many consortia expressed interest in Microcosm, a prototypical open hypertext system, produced by the Multimedia Research Group at the University of Southampton.

Microcosm is a program which allows the author (or teacher or instructor) to collect files of almost any format (word processed files, graphics, spreadsheets, databases and even executable programs), and to incorporate them into a resource base. Microcosm allows users to add their own links, data files, paths and annotations just as if they were the original author, but kept separate from the original author’s materials. Microcosm achieves this by keeping links separate from the actual data files. Whenever a file is shown, Microcosm will collect the links from the active databases and insert them at the correct place in the data. Thus, new links are added without interfering with the published materials, and using separate databases of links it is possible to present different views of the same data to different users. In the face of growing use of the Web, Microcosm is still seen by many innovators as the first of a new generation of hypertext authoring environments.

In 1995 Multicosm Ltd was started, with the license to develop and market the award-winning Microcosm Plus, aimed at the Interactive Electronic Manual market. Recently, however, the company detected renewed interest in open hypertext systems from the educational market and in 1999 produced Microcosm Pro, a product that is easier to use and compatible with the Web.

Some Microcosm projects are:

1. Software Teaching of Modular Physics (The SToMP project)
SToMP is a TLTP consortium led by the University of Surrey. The consortium built modules (equivalent to a whole first year module) for Measurement and Uncertainty, Waves and Optics.

The resources that the consortium collected on-line included a complete collection of notes, and a couple of text books. There are two outstanding features of the SToMP project:

• the large number of simulations (programmed in Visual Basic) that allow students to “perform” experiments and
  
  
• the on-line glossary, based on Microcosm’s generic link technology that builds automatic links from every occurrence of any keyword in the physics domain.
  

Submitted by Hugh Davis Dec 1999

© University of Southampton