Page 23 - Campus Technology, March/April 2018

SPECIAL SECTION
2017 CT IMPACT AWARDS IN DEPTH meg lloyd Making Connections With Multimedia Content
Johns Hopkins developed a web application to help learners explore relationships among visual materials. Users can annotate images and link to rich multimedia resources to put the materials in a visual context.
web application that would work in any subject area to orient students to rich-media content resources and allow viewers to explore relationships among these media elements. They created the application in-house and named it Reveal.
Johns Hopkins instructors have used Reveal with a variety of course topics, and they have mapped content in many contexts. For example, in a neuroscience course, an online study guide mapped out the anatomical components of the brain and illustrated their functions. Another course allowed students to use Reveal to design their own vir- tual museum. And sociology courses mapped the loca- tion of public murals in Baltimore to study the cultures of that city’s neighborhoods.
Reveal is derived from an earlier Flash application devel- oped in-house back in 2007 called the Interactive Map Tool, first used as a collaborative website for a general biology course that mapped materials students found at various locations on campus. More than 300 students
uploaded files to the site, and the application managed the materials using a campus map. Today, the Reveal team has taken the basic idea of showing visual relationships among content elements much further, mapping them in any subject context. Team members have rewritten the application from Flash to HTML5 and JavaScript, and a modernized interface
Category: Teaching and Learning
Institution: Johns Hopkins University
Project: Reveal Image Annotation Tool
Project lead: Reid Sczerba, multimedia developer, Center for Education Resources
Tech lineup: Developed in-house
INCREASINGLY, INSTRUCTORS illustrate course content with rich media to engage students. But it can be cumbersome for faculty to work with available technolo- gies to annotate and map the relationships among disparate media elements. At Johns Hopkins University (MD), multi- media developers in the Center for Educational Resources were determined to provide their faculty with an easy-to-use
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2018
Reveal uses a tree data structure to link annotated images with associated media items.