| dc.description.abstract | The rising interest in repositories for educational material consolidates efforts of the diversied educational community. Developers, teachers, and designers have recognized the need for collaboration in order to create the best-possible learning objects, and, moreover, to preserve and reuse them. Developing learning objects in the field of Computer Graphics is archetypical in several aspects; we naturally face the needs for complex visualizations, we bring along profound knowledge in human-computer interaction, and we are familiar with the underlying technology. Nevertheless, interactive visualizations are supported little in current learning technology standards, especially with regards to metadata and interoperability. Standards enable educators to browse and search repositories, integrate the object of preference into their curriculum, and adapt it to their needs. To raise sympathies for interactivity and clarify its denotation, we identify three approaches: (1) the developer's view of interactivity as user interface characteristics, (2) the educator's view of interaction between internal and external knowledge representation, and (3) the communication theorist's view that provides a qualitative framework based on learning theories. We reformulate the results in terms of Computer Graphics principles and illustrate the impact of a consequent implementation of great interactivity in Web-based teaching with components of our own courses. Most notably, we propose a visual scripting paradigm that communicates not only a learning objects data, but functionality, through Drag and Drop operations on images. | en_US |
