“Developing a CD-ROM to Teach Ceramics” by Bendis

Beyond the technical considerations, the integration of multimedia in education requires the consent, participation, and enthusiasm of the educator. To foster this relationship, a graduate student in Art Education, who is also the university’s instructional multimedia and virtual reality specialist, volunteered to develop a CD-ROM documenting a Raku ceramics workshop to demonstrate the power of technology in cooperation with established pedagogical goals. This paper outlines the technical considerations that went into the production of this diverse CD-ROM. The production was grounded in the idea of the ‘economy of multimedia’ following a pragmatic path of realism and compromise to obtain a goal with available resources. These constraints did not limit the variety of media elements or the technical and creative application of their use.

The purpose of the CD-ROM is to follow the pedagogical outline of the workshop and to share experiential learning as well as concrete instructional demonstrations on Raku; it also serves to educate about the potentials of multimedia and of instruction with multimedia.