The following appeared in Volume 98, Number 1 (Fall, 1998) of the APA Newsletters

It’s an exciting time for those interested in using computers in education. In the following remarks, I will provide a guide to the developing technologies that allow individuals to put audio, video, and animations up on the World Wide Web. I will concentrate on products from RealNetworks and Microsoft, the two principal players in this arena. I will also discuss some streaming graphics animation programs, especially Macromedia’s Flash 3 and Microsoft’s Liquid Motion, which offer interesting possibilities for animating the Web. These technologies allow us to put our classroom drawings, charts, etc. on the Web in a compelling way. Before doing any of this, however, let me situate the developments we will be discussing here in a larger context.

When personal computers first became available in the early 1980’s, they were primitive by today’s standards in terms of CPU¹, RAM², and disk storage space³. But more importantly, for our purposes, is the highly limited nature of both input and output in those machines, a condition that persisted long after dramatic increases in CPU speed and memory resources. This was particularly true of DOS and Windows machines; Apple products were less constricted in terms of input and output. I will confine my account here to DOS and Windows.

The initial computer was essentially a box. Input was confined to a keyboard, which meant that it was exclusively alphanumeric. Output was confined to a black-and-white printer (either dot matrix or daisy wheel) and a screen, which was initially monochrome and text-based. No matter how fast the CPU, no matter how much memory, such machines could only handle text.

With the advent of Windows 3.0, we witnessed a long transitional phrase in which the software in the box became increasingly capable of handling non-text materials. Graphics programs such as CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator became increasingly sophisticated. However, there were still serious limitations both to getting material into the computer and to getting it out again. These graphics programs were at their best if you were producing original drawing from scratch; it was difficult to import existing drawings into such programs in a way that allowed them to be edited easily. There were also problems getting graphics out of the computer: exact color matches, for example, were often tricky to achieve for the non-professional. Thus, during this transitional phase, the software within the computer grew in sophistication, but the input and output devices often lagged far behind the capabilities of the software.

In the past two years, this situation has begun to change on a large scale. The first change, long present on the Mac and then in Windows 3.0, was the mouse. Sound cards brought both audio input (microphone and line-in jacks for tape recorders and other audio devices) and audio output (speakers and headphones), and in the process increased the demand for disk space dramatically. Scanners became more affordable and popular, and they allow not only the quick inputting of text but also the easy inputting of photographs. Drawing pads, although less common, also allowed more sophisticated forms of input. Most recently, video capture boards have allowed video to become an increasingly common feature of PC’s. This allows input from television, VCR’s, and dedicated video cameras. The quality of video still leaves much to be desired, and the memory requirements are often daunting, but the move has been made.

Output has become increasingly sophisticated as well. High resolution color monitors offer dramatic display possibilities, and inexpensive color printers can now come close to providing excellent photo-quality prints. Color has now become a standard element, even in document design. The only major barrier to the proliferation of color has been the prevalence of copiers and fax machines that handle only black-and-white.

Two other developments have had an even more profound impact. The first of these is a hardware device: the CD-ROM and, more recently, the recordable CD-ROM. CD-ROM’s allowed the easy input of very large programs into the computer. This was not only convenient for installing large programs and program suites, but allowed sophisticated games to be run easily on computers. That, in turn, was important because it allowed computers to be more than sophisticated number- and text-crunchers. None of this, however, had much of an impact on the output of your average computer until easy and comparatively inexpensive (under $400) CD-ROM recordable technology became available. This now allows computer users to create and distribute highly sophisticated multimedia "documents." These may be highly interactive, rich in graphics and sound, and far different from their text-based ancestors. DVD technology, of course, has further expanded the amount of disk space available (from 630 MB to multiple gigabytes) as well as supporting more powerful audio and video technologies.

In many ways, however, the most important change in input and output had little to do with these various hardware devices. The World Wide Web has had the most profound impact as both an input device and as an output device. Once individuals were connected to the Web, they could bring all sort of content into their computers via the Web. When I was developing Ethics Updates <http://ethics.acusd.edu/> my World Wide Web site, I realized that I did not need to scan in artwork: I could simply find it on the Web in most cases, available free of charge and in the public domain.

The possibilities that the Web offers in terms of output are even more profound, for they have changed the nature of a document. Not only is color possible (indeed, unavoidable), but also audio, video, and animations are increasingly easy to produce. Initially, this change simply involved the inclusion of hyperlinks and still graphics. The web page has become a new kind of document which is no longer exclusively text-based. It may contain photos and graphics, animations, audio clips, and video segments. As such, it allows a much different output, one that contains rich possibilities that we are only beginning to explore. (All of this, incidentally, has become increasingly accessible with the development of high speed internet connections.)

Given this background, let’s turn now to some of the software that has opened up the possibility of providing rich audio and video content on the web. Let me begin by commenting on ways in which this can be used within the context of philosophy, and then describe some of the software for doing it.

Years ago I ran a conference on the virtues at the University of San Diego, and there was a session on "rottenness" that included a spirited and brilliant defense of rottenness by Jean Hampton. I often wished that I could send my students to that session. Unfortunately, it seemed to be gone forever.

My own interest in putting video and audio on the web arose out of such experiences. Lectures and conferences are ephemeral events. Often, we’re thankful for that, but sometimes there are gems that we wish we could share. Streaming audio and video allow that to happen.

Interestingly, this is not something that you can do only with conferences in the future. As it turned out, I had asked our Media Center to make audio tapes of several of the sessions at that conference. After obtaining permission (in this case, from Jean’s husband, who is still alive), I was able to encode this session from the audio tape and put it up on the web. Now, whenever I sponsor an ethics-related lecture on our campus, I have our Media Center videotape the event and then make it available on the Web. For example, we had Carol Gilligan on campus for a week to give an Ethics across the Curriculum workshop, and the full two days of her faculty workshop is now available as RealVideo on both our Ethics across the Curriculum website (http://ethics.acusd.edu/eac/) and on Ethics Updates.

Other resources can be made available in a similar way. Hugh LaFollette, for example, has had an interview program on his local public radio affiliate for several years now, and he often interviews interesting moral philosophers. I am now putting these tapes, encoded as RealAudio, up on my site. Just click and listen to the program of your choice—Hugh interviewing Sissela Bok on lying, Don Marquis on abortion, and many others.

Streaming audio and video technology will not only allow us to put tapes of existing conferences and lectures on the web, but it is also now possible to broadcast live audio and video over the web relatively easily and cheaply. Earlier this year, Cal State Fullerton put on a conference on "Democracy and Self-Interest," and they piped the conference to my RealServer and I broadcast it live on the web. The hardware requirements for the computer that does the encoding on the spot are heavy (a 400 megahertz machine is recommended), and it requires a good internet connection (already available on most campuses, but difficult to get cheaply in hotels).

Finally, these technologies allow more interactive possibilities as well. At last year’s CAP conference at Carnegie-Mellon, for example, I was able to make a PowerPoint presentation with live audio to the conference and hear questions and respond to them, even though I was in my study at home in California. If I had had a camera hooked up to my computer (which I now do), the conference participants could also have seen me. I didn’t then have a camera, which was fortunate, since I was giving the presentation in my pajamas. All of this was done with Microsoft NetMeeting, which is available for free.

It is easy to imagine how conferences could mix physically-present participants with virtual participants and presenters. Certainly, it would be easy to broadcast conference sessions directly over the web, using either RealVideo or NetShow, and have people all over the world watching and listening. It is also possible to have one person do a presentation to a large group from a remote site, such as I did at the CAP conference. It is even possible to have virtual conferences on line with multiple interactive participants using both audio and video, but the bandwidth requirements increase dramatically as the number of participants increases. Currently this is not a realistic option for most conferences.

One of the pioneers in the field of web-based audio and video is RealNetworks (formerly Progressive Networks), which has been the leading (if not always best) player in the development of streaming technology. This technology was crucial to the use of audio and video on the web. Prior to its development, to "play" an audio or video file over the web involved first downloading the entire file to your computer and then playing it from the hard drive of your own machine. Streaming technology changed this by downloading the file in smaller packets and beginning to play the file while new packets were being downloaded. The result was the playback could begin much more quickly, even on very large files. This streaming technology was further improved by increasingly effective compression techniques (which reduced the overall size of the files) and faster internet connections (which allowed an increased speed of transmission).

The 5.0 version of Real systems became the de facto standard for delivering audio and video over the web. About a month ago, RealNetworks released the beta version of its new system, the G2 system. The quality of its audio is vastly improved.

Microsoft entered this arena after RealNetworks was firmly established, but it has quickly gained ground. NetShow 2.0 was technically superior to RealSystem 5.0, delivering better quality with superior compression techniques. Moreover, it was free. It, too, required a plug-in, but eventually became an integrated part of Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer 4.0.

Increasingly, many of us are interested in putting our ideas on the web. One way is to post papers we have written. This is valuable, but it does not make use of the unique potentialities of the medium of the web. Here are some developments that begin to tap that potential.

PowerPoint has long been the presentation software of choice for Windows users, and the PowerPoint97 version allows users to save presentations as html files. Unfortunately, the result is not technologically very sophisticated. PowerPoint supplies a navigation bar, but the principal drawback is that each slide is saved as a separate GIF or JPEG file. All animation is lost, the files are comparatively large and thus slow to load, and they lack the sharpness and scalability of vector graphics.

RealNetworks has developed a plug-in for PowerPoint that allows one to stream PowerPoint presentations over the web with RealAudio voice narration. This allows streaming narration for a PowerPoint presentation over the web. The duration of each slide is set to the length of that slide’s narration. The show can be paused at any point with the standard RealPlayer pause button. The slides are still single graphics files (one JPEG per slide) and lack the animation of a regular PowerPoint presentation.

For those of you, like me, who write and draw on the board in class continually, and who see the world of ideas in visual and dynamic terms, these programs are very constricting. Let me briefly comment on some software that is presently available and conclude with a comment about the future direction.

The major player in animation software has been Macromedia, and its software products—especially Director, to a lesser extent Authorware, and recently Flash—have been principal authoring programs for CD-ROM’s and, through Macromedia’s Shockwave technology, for streaming animations over the web. Flash has been particularly successful in this, since its files are exceptionally small and stream very well. Director and Authorware are both highly sophisticated and powerful programs with steep learning curves when compared to a program such as PowerPoint. Director is much more robust graphically, and it is often used in authoring CD-ROM-based games. It’s a superb tool for developing complex animations. Authorware is much stronger in its text-handling capabilities, and it an excellent environment for developing computer-based training courses. Flash 3 is easier to learn, cheaper, and more easily streamed over the web. The new version of RealPlayer, for example, has Flash support built-in, and Netscape now has Flash support built into its browser. Recently Microsoft introduced Liquid Motion, an animation program that may compete with Flash. Liquid Motion is somewhat easier to use than Flash, but is less robust and much less flexible.

The interesting thing about these programs is that they open up to the average user a mode of expression far different from anything we have been used to. No longer are we bound to text, or even to static pictures, or even to movies. We can now create highly interactive and highly dynamic works that combine text, sound, and graphics. This opens up the possibility of doing in a sophisticated way what many of us have done for years in a very rough and imprecise way.

No one has yet combined ease of use and power in a presentation program. PowerPoint and other similar programs certainly have ease of use, but they lack the power found in other types of programs such as word processing (Word, WordPerfect). Flash, Liquid Motion, Authorware, and Director are all quite powerful, but none has achieved genuine ease of use.

In the near future, expect to see these two types of programs converge. Mainstream presentation software such as PowerPoint already contains small elements of animation, and I suspect that the animation capabilities of such programs will grow exponentially in the near future. At the same time, programs such as Macromedia’s Director, Authorware, and Flash will—if they are to survive—move toward increasing ease of use. As this occurs, it opens up the possibility of authoring new and exciting kinds of works.

1. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the main computing element in a personal computer, e.g. the Intel Pentium chip.

2. Random Access Memory is temporary memory storage used in running programs, as opposed to Read Only Memory and information saved on a disk. RAM allows for the dynamic computing we do when using, for instance, a word processor. Generally, the more RAM the faster the machine performance.