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Guenter Hilmer - Phd Thesis - Glamorgan Dspace - University of ...

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2.6 Teaching and learning strategies 2 LITERATURE REVIEW<br />

learning strategy can be expressed by these primitives, then we regard the strategy<br />

as computable in our framework.<br />

What technology should be used to achieve the separation <strong>of</strong> functional and<br />

knowledge based content?<br />

The taxonomy described above provided the basis for a prototype <strong>of</strong> a hypermedia<br />

educational authoring tool. Walker and Hess et al. emphasise that a critical issue<br />

for such an application is platform independence and the combination <strong>of</strong> author-<br />

ing aids and graphics capabilities [2]. Therefore, the selection <strong>of</strong> the underlying<br />

techniques is an essential part in the development <strong>of</strong> the prototype. There are two<br />

possible approaches. Either an existing hypermedia authoring tool will be used for<br />

further development or a new, specialised authoring tool needs to be developed.<br />

The second approach was selected for this project and a decision concerning the<br />

development languages and tools also needed to be made. Java is the de facto<br />

standard for a platform independent programming language and was chosen for<br />

the prototype development [92]. Furthermore, the educational material produced<br />

must be deliverable over the WWW. The intention for this project was to use<br />

one <strong>of</strong> the existing WWW standards, XML (Extensible Markup Language) [93],<br />

for the indexing and linking <strong>of</strong> the knowledge based content in our framework.<br />

SMIL (Synchronised Multimedia Integrated Language) seemed to be an option<br />

for representing and defining our hypermedia primitives in hypermedia authoring,<br />

because SMIL is a language for describing interactive synchronised multimedia<br />

distributed over the WWW [94].<br />

Additionally, it has to be mentioned that during the work on this project several<br />

new technologies have emerged. Those new technologies, for example the .net-<br />

Framework [95] <strong>of</strong> Micros<strong>of</strong>t could also have been selected for this project.<br />

However, due to the platform independence <strong>of</strong> the Java framework, this work<br />

focuses on this technology.<br />

49

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