|
Iolis Authoring in a Web Environment
Robin Widdison
Director, Centre for Law &
Computing
University of Durham
This paper was presented at the 17th
BILETA Conference
Abstract
Recently, there has been increasing
focus on the acquisition of research skills by law undergraduates.
One reason for this interest is a belief that many such students do
not acquire an adequate level of research skills by the time that
they graduate. Reflecting this concern, the Law Society/Bar
Council's Joint Statement on Qualifying Law Degrees and
the Quality Assurance Agency's Benchmark Standards for Law
both place great emphasis on the need to improve research skills
training at University level. In the light of these developments,
Durham University's Centre for Law & Computing was asked to
develop a self-paced learning package providing more advanced
training on the skills necessary to do legal research
projects.
It was envisaged that the learning
package in question would take the form of an Iolis style
workbook. Rather than use traditional law courseware authoring
tools, however, the Centre chose to experiment by attempting from
the outset to develop the workbook as a website comprising
interlaced text and interactions. If successful, such an approach
would have the benefits of producing a prototype that was: (i)
readily accessible across the Internet, or a campus intranet; (ii)
customisable to the needs of individual law schools; (iii) flexible
enough to reflect more of an author's own personal approach; and
(iv) massively interconnectable with campus intranets and with the
Internet at large.
Keywords: Iolis , World Wide Web, convergence, models of
convergence, legal research projects, dissertations, advanced legal
research skills, prototype workbook.
This is a Refereed
article published on 16 August 2002.
Citation: Widdison R,
Iolis Authoring in a Web Environment', The Journal of
Information, Law and Technology (JILT), 2002
(2)<http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/02-2/widdison.html>.
New citation as at 1/1/04:
<http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/2002_2/widdison/>.
1. Introduction
1.1 Durham's Background
Durham University's Centre for Law
and Computing has long been interested in the application of
information and communications technology (ICT) to legal education.
This interest has expressed itself in work on e.g. computer
simulation, electronic law tutorials and the futurology of legal
education ( Widdison et
al, 1997 , Widdison and Schulte,
1998 , Widdison, 2000 ). The greatest
focus however has been on the development and deployment of
interactive learning packages such as Iolis ( Scott and Widdison, 1994 , Widdison, 1995 ). In relation to
Iolis , the
Centre was one of the original sponsors of the Law Courseware
Consortium ( LCC )
which celebrates its tenth birthday this year. A representative
served for many years on the management committee of the LCC. In
addition, a member of the Centre played a part in the initial
design of Iolis and led the first team of authors ? the
contract law team ? ultimately writing half the total number of
contract workbooks as well as a workbook on legal communication
skills.
1.2 Legal Research Skills
Recently, there has been increasing
focus on the acquisition of research skills by law undergraduates.
One reason for this interest is a belief that many such students do
not acquire an adequate level of research skills by the time that
they graduate. Reflecting this concern, the Law Society/Bar
Council's Joint
Statement on Qualifying Law Degrees and the Quality
Assurance Agency's Benchmark Standards for
Law both place great emphasis on the need to improve
research skills training at University level. Most if not all law
schools already provide basic training in legal research skills.
Such training takes the form of how to use physical and virtual law
libraries and is typically made available to undergraduates in
their first year. Subsequent training, though, is often rather
sporadic and piecemeal.
Durham's response has been to move
towards introducing a compulsory legal research project for final
year undergraduates. This research project normally involves
producing a 10,000 word dissertation. Such a project is seen as a
key focus for providing more advanced training in legal research
skills. Clearly, though, students need to be given adequate means
to acquire the skills in question. The curriculum at Durham is
already very full, however. In particular, there is little scope
for extra contact time. With this dilemma in mind, Durham's Centre
for Law & Computing was asked to develop a self-paced learning
package designed to show undergraduates how to conduct sustained
legal research projects. Our existing interest in - and extensive
experience of - building Iolis style courseware led us to
conclude that this type of approach might well prove suitable for
such a package.
1.3 An Iolis/Web
Prototype?
One obvious way of developing an
Iolis style package on research projects would be to use
Iolis Author ? Iolis's dedicated authoring tool.
However, there were a number of reasons why it was decided to take
an alternative route on this occasion. Firstly, the power and the
potential of the World Wide Web (the Web) inevitably demands
constant rethinking about the way in which ICT is deployed in legal
education ( Geist, 1997 ). Nothing is sacred -
not even a well-tried and successful system such as Iolis !
Secondly, the LCC itself has plans to move Iolis onto a
Web platform in due course. Thirdly, as acquisition of legal
research skills now requires as much familiarity with electronic
sources and search tools as with print sources and search tools,
use of a Web based workbook by students would be a particularly
relevant learning experience. Finally, Iolis Author has
been out of action since Autumn 2001 (editor's note: a new edition
of Iolis Author is available from September 2002).
Iolis has been converted to a 32-bit format and the
authoring tool has not yet been upgraded to work in conjunction
with this new version (editor's note: the new authoring tool has
now been upgraded to 32-bit format). For these reasons, the Centre
concluded that it would be a useful and interesting educational
experiment to build an Iolis style workbook in a Web
environment.
2.
The Issue
2.1 Iolis
The LCC developed, maintains and
publishes Iolis .
Iolis comprises a collection of workbooks and a resource
book. The workbooks, which are multimedia in nature, present the
student with pages of self-paced learning materials comprising text
interlaced with interactions. These interactions are not just
offered as detached revision tests and quizzes made available to
students after they have completed the learning materials. The
interactions can also be embedded at appropriate points within the
learning materials themselves to encourage students to engage more
deeply with those materials. In essence, interactions take the form
not only of questions designed to test, but also of questions
designed to teach ( Mayer, 1997 )[ 1 ].
The resource book component of Iolis , which is either
directly accessible from the workbooks or can operate as a
freestanding entity, contains a large collection of primary sources
together with a smaller number of secondary sources.
What are the strengths of
Iolis ? The pedagogic approach of using self-paced learning
materials comprising interlaced text and interactions - while
admittedly less stimulating for the average student than human
contact in e.g. tutorials ? is widely thought to be more engaging
and challenging than passive text alone ( Jones and
Scully, 1998 , Paliwala, 2001 ). The
underlying educational philosophy is succinctly expressed in the
Chinese proverb:
'What I hear, I forget. What I
see, I remember. What I do, I understand'.
As for the workbooks themselves,
there are now over one hundred of them covering fourteen mainstream
legal subjects. These workbooks have all been written by authors
who are academic specialists in their respective fields. The
associated resource book has also grown until it now contains
several thousand full text case reports, pieces of legislation and
articles. This means that students have access to a powerful online
library at the same time that they are using the Iolis
workbooks. They can bring up on screen the majority of the sources
cited and discussed in the workbooks by clicking on appropriate
hyperlinks. The general look and feel of Iolis is widely
regarded as attractive and easy to use, and with some
modifications, it has stood the test of time reasonably
well.
What then are the weaknesses of
Iolis ? Born into a pre-Web world, Iolis lacks
many of the features that Web users now regard as standard. While
it may be possible to launch Iolis from a Web browser, it
cannot run across the Web. New and revised Iolis workbooks
are sometimes delivered via the Web, but expansion and updating is
not a constant process as it now is with many websites. For most
users, upgrading takes place twice a year when a new CDROM arrives
through the post and is duly installed. As originally envisaged,
Iolis was planned to be customisable, allowing for a great
deal of adaptation by law schools to fit in with their own
educational philosophies. However, this feature was never
implemented beyond the provision of a limited annotation facility
( Moodie, 1997 )[ 2 ]. Ten years
ago, the level of authoring expertise was so low that a
handholding, heavily standardised authoring tool was unquestionably
the only way forward. Today, when it is common for academics to
develop their own Web based materials, many would probably
appreciate greater freedom to develop workbooks that reflected more
of their own personal approach. Iolis does not exhibit the
massive degree of interconnectivity that is a prime characteristic
of a typical website. While clearly an important location in its
own right, Iolis does not really function as a powerful
gateway to other campus intranets and to the Internet at
large.
2.2 The Web
The Web is the principal publishing
arm of the Internet. It is an access?orientated multimedia
technology which unlocks the awesome power of hyperlinking. The Web
is founded upon the notion of massive interconnectivity where every
location ? i.e. every webpage - is simultaneously capable of being
a gateway to the rest of the Web. The importance of the Web is
catching on in the developed world in a similar way to, and to a
similar extent as, other universally used communication/content
media such as the telephone, the radio, and television. Where it
differs, however, is that it is catching on at an enormously faster
rate than any of these previous media.
One of the strengths of the Web is
its huge popularity both as medium and as message. It is estimated
that there are currently nearly 37 million servers connected to the
Web ( Netcraft, 2002 ). Usage of the Web is
no longer measured in terms of thousands or millions of users, but
in percentages of national and continental populations. As a
result, the look, feel and functionality of webpages and the
browsers that display them have become a dominant informational
paradigm. Post-Web operating systems and applications ? if they
have not already migrated to the Web ? frequently mimic some or all
of the features of webpages and browsers. Another strength is that
webpages and websites are often highly customisable by users. Not
only can features such as backgrounds, fonts and colours be altered
at will but, more importantly, users can select and sort individual
pages from a variety of existing websites, and thereby create an
entirely new website.
Let us now turn to the weaknesses of
the Web. Its success has also to some extent given rise to its
limitations. Being so huge, users can experience great difficulty
finding useful materials. Much-vaunted search engines are now of
declining value as they index ever smaller proportions of an
ever-expanding Web ( Lawrence and Giles,
1999 ). Furthermore, search engines lack the sophistication to
cope with the poor signal to noise ratio[ 3 ] that is often
associated with the use of such engines. Human-made Web directories
greatly improve the signal to noise ratio. However, they have
struggled to keep up with the expansion of the Web from the very
start. Another problem is that, so far, the Web has tended to
evolve as a generalist medium. As such, it is not always well
adapted to specific uses. As we shall see, the development of the
medium for self-paced, interactive learning purposes has been
relatively unsophisticated, so far. Yet another problem is that,
from an author's point of view, while there are only a few browsers
in common use, many different versions of these browsers are being
utilized. This, coupled with the ability that users have customise
the display of each webpage, may contribute to a tendency to 'dumb
down' Web materials in order to ensure maximum possible
accessibility.
2.3 Models of Convergence
Given that both Iolis and
the Web have strengths and weaknesses, is it possible to converge
the two technologies so that the strengths of both are preserved
while the weaknesses are diminished? To explore this question, let
us identify and describe a number of models that exhibit varying
degrees of convergence. Here, four models are identified. They are
as follows:
A. The Echo Model : This
model involves gradually developing Iolis's interface to
maintain a resemblance to the look, feel and functionality of Web
browsers and webpages. The model is the easiest to achieve and,
indeed, the LCC has been applying it for some years. As a result,
the Iolis interface has some similarity to a Web browser.
Recently, the directional arrows migrated from the right to the
left of the Iolis toolbar to mimic the typical browser.
Authors can now create hyperlinks to particular websites in the
text of their pages, and law schools can set up a collection of
links to websites accessible from the toolbar. Appearances are
deceptive, however. Iolis still lacks most of the
functionality of a Web browser and the degree of customisability
that a true website would possess. Furthermore, as we have seen, it
does not exhibit the level of interconnectivity that would enable
it simultaneously to be a location in its own right and a powerful
gateway to other campus intranets and to the Internet at large. A
particular problem with this echo model is that superficial
resemblance masks the fact that, beneath the surface,
Iolis technology is slipping ever further behind
faster-moving Web technologies.
B. The Nesting Model : Such
a model involves embedding Iolis's existing, non-Web
workbooks and resource book within a website of other, related
materials in order to create an enhanced and customised learning
environment. Valuable work on this model has been done at Coventry
University's School of International Studies and Law. This work has
led to the development of a system called IolisPlus . The
package seeks to supplement existing Iolis workbooks by
providing - among other things - annotations & comments, extra
questions designed to promote deeper learning of some of the
matters raised by Iolis , additional materials of a more
contextual nature, and an online discussion forum ( Grantham, 1999 , Grantham, 2000 ). While this work is
clearly both useful and important, perhaps its most significant
message is to highlight the relatively unsatisfactory situation
that we are currently in, and the pressing need for a fuller degree
of convergence between Iolis and the Web.
C. The Conversion Model :
This model involves enhancing Iolis by enabling it to
export its existing non-Web pages as webpages. Interestingly,
CALI Author - developed by the Center for
Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (US CALI) - already possesses
such a facility. This came about as a result of merging an
embryonic Web authoring tool called Webolis ( Mayer, 1997 ) with an existing Iolis
based authoring tool. Many of the workbooks created using CALI
Author are now available both in traditional non-Web form and
as websites. Adding a conversion facility would enable the LCC (or
perhaps individual workbook authors) to export both existing and
new Iolis workbooks to a Web format. Once converted, such
workbooks would, of course, be accessible over the Web. Webpages
that are produced by such conversion, though, are inevitably
mirrors of their original non-Web format. While the look, feel and
functionality of such workbooks is similar to other websites, there
is also an obvious rigidity to such converted materials derived
from their origins. For example, authors do not have the degree of
freedom that many have now experienced in the process of developing
of their own Web based materials.
D. The Fusion Model : What
would Iolis have been like if it had been devised and
developed just after the coming of the Web, rather than just
before? Basically, this model seeks to answer that question. It
involves distilling authoring techniques from existing
Iolis workbooks, and applying them from the outset in a
Web environment. If successful, such an approach might be the best
way to bring law courseware into the mainstream of the Web
paradigm. Iolis would not just look like a website, or be
embedded in a website, or be an exported Web version of
Iolis . The two separate technologies would have been fully
converged. The result of such a convergence might be workbooks with
all the features that we associate with Iolis together
with all the features that we associate with the Web. One immediate
problem with the fusion model, though, is that a completely new
Iolis authoring tool would need to be developed to operate
in conjunction with an existing Web authoring tool such as
Macromedia's Dreamweaver 4 . Even more onerous, all the
existing workbooks might have to be virtually rewritten. This could
be a huge undertaking consuming a great deal of time, effort and
money. We will return to this difficulty in the
conclusion.
3.
The Project
3.1 Project Aims
The project undertaken by the Centre
had the following aims:
-
To develop a skills training package
for undergraduates doing legal research projects;
-
To build a Web based prototype
workbook using Iolis authoring techniques;
-
To explore the fusion model of
convergence.
Achievement of these aims involved
selecting a suitable Web development tool and using that tool to
build the prototype workbook. The intention was then to evaluate
the prototype in order to determine both its effectiveness as a
research skills training package, and what it revealed about
applying Iolis authoring techniques in a Web environment.
The Centre obtained a grant from the City Solicitors' Educational
Trust to fund the project. The grant was mostly used to cover
replacement teaching costs so that an existing member of staff
could undertake the development work. The remainder of the grant
was used to buy appropriate Web development tools and relevant
books. The developer who undertook the project work ? the author of
this paper ? already had a background in designing and authoring
Iolis workbooks coupled with some existing experience in
developing websites. It was decided that the duration of the
project would be one year starting on 1 October 2001.
3.2 Choice of Development
Tools
One the first tasks to be undertaken
was the identification and acquisition of suitable Web development
tools[ 4 ]. The developer began by looking at Web based
educational environments such as Blackboard and
Web
CT . These packages provided the means to develop
interactions. However, the features were clearly designed for use
in connection with quizzes ? questions asked to test - and did not
seem to lend themselves readily to the integration of text and
interactive teaching questions. Furthermore, the range of
interactions available was very limited. The developer moved on to
consider some other Web development tools. A number of such
packages were examined including, for example,
Questionmark's Perception and
Teaching and Coursework Online ( TACO ). However,
like Web CT and Blackboard , these types of
packages also seemed to have been designed to ask testing questions
rather than teaching questions. Furthermore, while some of these
packages did offer a reasonably rich array of interactions, the
range of interactions was still very limited by Iolis
standards.
Next, the developer considered the
potential of US CALI's CALI Author package. CALI
Author is derived from Iolis Author and is,
therefore, very similar in many ways. It supports the development
of pages of text interlaced with interactive teaching questions
well. Furthermore, its range of interactions is at least as rich as
Iolis . As indicated above, however, CALI
Author does not support the development of webpages
directly. It is first necessary to create pages in a traditional,
structured format. These pages can then be converted - i.e.
exported - to a Web format. Conversion does provide some of the
benefits of the Web such as accessibility via the Internet. On the
other hand, the learning materials seem to be no more customisable
than the non-Web equivalent and that authors lack the freedom of
being able to design their materials as webpages from the outset.
The developer concluded that CALI Author was not a
suitable tool to explore the fusion model of
convergence.
Moving on from these packages, the
developer considered using a combination of the highly successful
Web development package Dreamweaver 4 [ 5 ]
together with an add-on educational package ? Macromedia's
CourseBuilder . This combination had been suggested by the
LCC albeit with the warning that, while Dreamweaver 4 was
easy and intuitive to learn and to use, CourseBuilder was,
by contrast, much more difficult. Initial experience suggested
that, while this combination of software tools was not perfect, it
did provide a means to develop a Web based workbook comprising
pages of text interlaced with interactive teaching questions.
Furthermore, at first sight it appeared that the
CourseBuilder package might have the potential to create
as rich a range of interactions as Iolis itself. The
developer concluded that the suggested combination appeared to
provide the best affordable means of exploring the fusion model of
convergence.
3.3 Challenges
The first challenge for the
developer was that there was no obvious model for a course on legal
research projects. There are several excellent books for students
on basic legal research skills such as how to use both physical and
virtual law libraries ( Clinch, 2001 , Holborn, 2001 , Thomas and
Knowles, 2001 ). Also, there are many books either of a general
nature, or covering non-law disciplines that deal with how to carry
out student research projects (e.g. Cryer,
2000 , Luck, 1999 , Sharp and
Howard, 1996 ). However, there appear to be no books that show
undergraduates how to conduct legal research projects. This meant
that the developer's task was not so much reinventing the wheel as
inventing it from scratch! To do this, he first became familiar
with the existing literature on basic legal research skills, and
the non-legal works on doing student research projects. Then,
adding in his own experience of supervising undergraduate and
postgraduate students at Durham University, the developer
endeavoured to put together a course on legal research projects
tailored specifically to the needs of undergraduates.
Turning now to the technology, the
developer who had previously created Web based materials either
directly in hypertext mark-up language (HTML), or by using
Microsoft FrontPage immediately took to Dreamweaver
4 . Although there were times when an existing knowledge of
HTML still proved invaluable, it was soon clear why Dreamweaver
4 has become so popular among website developers. It is a
powerful, well-designed package with many useful features which is,
none-the-less, surprisingly easy to learn and to use. In addition,
the success of Dreamweaver 4 has resulted in shelves full
of well-written reference manuals on its use[ 6 ].
CourseBuilder , by contrast,
was nothing like so intuitive. In fairness, part of the problem is
that CourseBuilder is not well supported by reference
manuals[ 7 ]. While many of the manuals that have been
written for Dreamweaver 4 do contain brief descriptions of
CourseBuilder in the appendices, these descriptions are so
superficial that they are virtually useless to the would-be
developer. Learning to use CourseBuilder's standard
interactions proved to be less than straightforward. Learning to
develop completely new interactions in order to extend
CourseBuilder's range of interactions proved to be very
hard for someone without a computer programming background.
However, despite all the technical difficulties that the developer
experienced with CourseBuilder , he was eventually able to
make progress creating webpages that interlaced text and
interactive teaching questions reasonably successfully ? a
prototype workbook exhibiting quite a high degree of fusion between
Iolis and the Web.
A workbook on legal research
projects does not need anything like the degree of access to
additional support materials that a workbook on a substantive law
subject requires. If there had been a need for access to a large
collection of e.g. full text primary sources, the developer would
have examined whether direct access to legislation and case reports
held in a Web based legal information system such as the
British and Irish Legal Information Institute ( BAILII ) might have provided a suitable
alternative to the Iolis resource book. In fact, the only
links that the developer decided were needed for the prototype
workbook were either those to other research skills websites such
as Pettit's Internet for
Lawyers site, or those to Web legal search tools such as
Findlaw's LawCrawler search
engine and Carter's Lawlinks Web
directory. Needless-to-say, in a Web environment creating links to
these external websites was straightforward.
4.
The Outcome
4.1 The Workbook
The main product of the project is a
workbook in the form of a website containing self-paced learning
materials on legal research projects. It is hoped that this
prototype workbook will, in due course, prove useful to
undergraduates doing legal research projects. The workbook itself
is designed to be used either on its own, or in conjunction with
other research skills materials whether situated on other campus
intranets, or on the Internet at large. The workbook can be
operated in association with synchronous and asynchronous computer
communications technologies ( Woods, 2001 ). If
need be, the workbook's own navigation system can be bypassed
completely. Where this is done, the individual webpages can be
thought of as 'looseleaf' in the sense that they can be freely
sorted and selected. It is possible, for example, for a law school
to assemble a 'home-built' website with its own navigation system
incorporating some of the existing pages from the workbook together
with Web materials from elsewhere. For this reason, each individual
page in the workbook carries the developer's name and an assertion
of copyright!
The prototype workbook, which is
menu driven, consists of a collection of webpages a high proportion
of which comprise text interlaced with interactive teaching
questions. Versions of the picture & sound and video page types
were not used in the workbook although they could have been
implemented easily. Acceptable versions of the following
Iolis page types were implemented in Web format and can be
seen in the workbook:
-
Check box page
-
Click on picture page
-
Drag into category page
-
Drag into order page
-
Free text page
-
Long answer page
-
Matching pairs page
-
Menu page
-
Multiple choice page
-
Popup page
-
Scroll bars page
-
Slideshow page
-
Text select page
-
Text with diagram page.
It should be stressed that the
prototype workbook is very much a one-off demonstration of what is
possible. Although its pages and interactions can be used as a
source of ideas, or even as a set of templates for other websites,
it has none of the functions and facilities of an authoring tool.
It is hoped, however, that the workbook may be of some value to
those who develop an Iolis /Web authoring tool at a later
stage.
4.2 Evaluation
The evaluation of the website is
being conducted in four stages. A prototype version of the website
was presented at the seventeenth BILETA Conference at the Free
University of Amsterdam at Easter 2002 (Widdison, 2002). During the
second stage, those members of staff at Durham's law department who
themselves have strong track records as legal researchers were
invited to review and comment on the form and content of the
website. The third stage of evaluation involved a small group of
Durham's law undergraduates who had recently completed legal
research projects. These students were invited to examine the
website and to express their views about the quality and usefulness
of the materials by filling in and returning an electronic
questionnaire. Feedback from each stage of evaluation so far has
been used to revise and improve the website. It is anticipated that
a fourth stage of evaluation will be undertaken next year. This
will involve making the website available to all final-year Durham
law undergraduates and inviting them to express their views on it
by filling in and returning a questionnaire.
4.3 Deployment
As feedback from the three stages of
evaluation conducted so far indicates that the research skills
website is likely to prove a valuable educational tool, steps are
now being taken to make the site available permanently on the
campus intranet and to integrate the site as a major component of
the training and support that Durham law undergraduates receive in
connection with their legal research projects. It is possible that
the website will also be made available to the wider community of
law students via the Internet, if such a step is thought to be
appropriate. A decision will be made about wider accessibility in
due course.
5.
Conclusion
The developer concluded that, by
applying the fusion model of convergence, it was possible to
produce a prototype workbook that exhibited a number of advantages
over Iolis . It is claimed that the prototype
is:
-
Readily accessible across the
Internet or a campus intranet;
-
Customisable to the needs of
individual law schools;
-
Flexible enough to reflect more of
an author's own personal approach;
-
Massively interconnectable with
campus intranets and with the Internet at large.
However, the most significant
weakness of a fusion based approach, as we have seen, is that
converting the large number of existing Iolis workbooks is
an awesome task. While it does not necessarily amount to rewriting
the whole collection, it may not fall far short. Undoubtedly, for
this pragmatic reason the conversion model of convergence will be a
compelling preferred option for the LCC. A later version of
Iolis in which the existing workbooks are available either
in traditional or converted Web format will undoubtedly be seen as
a practical way forward.
It would be a pity to loose sight of
the advantages of the fusion model, though. Perhaps a dual approach
should be adopted. If a future Iolis comprises Web
versions of the existing workbooks, a future Iolis Author
might, perhaps, be rather like a more user-friendly version of
CourseBuilder , with a richer collection of ready-to-use
interactions. Authors of future workbooks could use their Web
authoring skills to develop their own collections of webpages using
a suitable general authoring package such as Dreamweaver .
In the process of writing these pages, authors might then, where
appropriate, insert interactions using such a future version of
Iolis Author . In conjunction with these tools and
techniques, authors could have access to a set of 'best practice'
templates provided by the LCC. If they felt sufficiently confident,
however, authors could forsake the templates and invent a look,
feel and functionality which matched their own personal approach to
the subject matter of their workbooks.
A decade on from the inauguration of
the Law Courseware Consortium, we are familiar with the
contemporary version of Iolis ? how it looks, how it
works, and how it is deployed and used. However, what will
Iolis be like five years from now?
Notes and
References
1 . i.e. not only summative assessment but also
formative assessment.
2 . Moodie asserts that Iolis must be
protected from 'local adaptation' in order to preserve the
intellectual property rights of workbook authors. He does not,
however, explain why he believes that authors' rights can only be
protected by such functional rigidity, or why he thinks that those
rights must inevitably outweigh pedagogical
considerations.
3 . The relative amounts of useful information and
useless information obtained.
4 . A very useful source of information about such
packages has been put together by Paul Maharg and can be bound at
the BILETA website at < http://www.bileta.ac.uk/cal/1.htm >.
5 .Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 was awarded
the accolade of best web authoring tool on the market by the
respected computer magazine Personal Computer World
( PCW ) in its November 2001 issue.
6 .The developer used Bruce, B. (2000) Teach
Yourself Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 in 24 Hours (Indianapolis,
Indiana; Sams Publishing) which proved to be reasonably
comprehensive and easy to understand on Dreamweaver
itself.
7 . The developer found only one - Baker, D. (2001)
CourseBuilder for Dreamweaver F/X & Design
(Scottsdale, Arizona: Coriolis).
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