Brown Bag Lecture

Presented by Michael Litzkow

September 14, 1999
12:00 - 1:00pm
Room 259 Educational Sciences Building

The Learning on Demand (LOD) project is working to make instructional lectures available to students in a Web browser interface. Good software should have a user interface based on concepts that are already familiar to the intended audience. The LOD project calls its presentation system "Teach," since it performs some of the functions of a teacher in a traditional classroom. For such a system to be useful, an authoring tool is needed to make it easy to create presentations. The authoring tool is called "MAESY" (pronounced "May Zee"). To create an LOD presentation using MAESY, video clips and a set of HTML pages are incorporated in lectures.

This Brown Bag lecture will include a short Teach presentation and user interface will be discussed. A video will demonstrate how to build a Teach presentation using MAESY. Litzkow will then discuss how to create and deploy lecture materials using this system.

Litzkow graduated with a B.S. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1983. Since then he has worked as a researcher on a wide variety of projects within the Computer Sciences department. While his official title is "associate researcher", his actual work involves building software infrastructure for people who do research. Lately, he has begun building software infrastructure for people who teach. His past projects include the CsNet Nameserver, the Charlotte Operating System, Condor, and the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel. In the Learning on Demand project he builds tools for the creation and presentation of lectures with a Web browser as the user interface.