A History of Tomorrows in Educational Multimedia

If we are to learn from history, then, as innovators in the field of educational multimedia, we might learn from past visions. Starting with the unimaginably ancient past (1985) and continuing through the present day, we'll note how a technology, once arrived, differs from its predicted form. I'll suggest that as we move from the days of exploratory microworlds, through shared virtual reality, then into annotated reality, we see a drift away from abstraction toward media supporting the learner's direct experience with the world. The presentation will feature video and live demonstrations (including a self-measuring-football toss) illustrating my own work in this field during this period.

— Randall B. Smith

About the Keynote Speaker

Randy Smith is a Senior Staff Scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he has been principal investigator in several areas, including projects in visualization technologies and object-oriented languages. He previously worked on the Kansas project, a 2D virtual world for creating multi-user simulations. Kansas was part of the world's largest study of distributed synchronous small group learning, another research project he lead. He was formerly co-leader of the Self project. The original Self paper recently won an award as being among the 3 most influential papers in the first ten years of the OOPSLA conference. Before joining Sun, he worked at Xerox PARC and Rank-Xerox EuroPARC in Cambridge England. His Ph.D. is in theoretical physics from the University of California at San Diego.

His hobbies include playing trumpet and jazz piano. He is the trumpet player in the jazz octet Octobop, whose CDs are available online.