Educational Multimedia

Making education more engaging, more enjoyable, and, in the end, more effective through the use of multimedia technology has been the goal of many researchers during the past few years. Encouraging results have been achieved so far. There are many examples where multimedia is used in educational scenarios with extraordinary benefits. The next generation of Web technologies and applications, popularly symmarized as Web 2.0, is serving another trigger for this area, which is often and rather surprisingly called E-Learning 2.0. Next generation of devices and technologies not only gives us new opportunities but also poses new problems. In the special section on educational multimedia, various authors submitted their work to showcase illustration regarding the current state of the field. Their work are as follows; "A virtual camera team for lecture recording", "Toward next-generation intelligent tutors", and "Application-specific music transcription for instrument tutoring". For the first one, the goal is to use a distributed computer system to produce lecture recordings that look like the result a professional human camera team would produce, that is, a video that is more lively and interesting than current single-camera recordings that don\´t cut away from the lecturer\´s talking head. For the second one, it explores the use of handwriting recognition-based interfaces in intelligent tutoring systems for students learning algebra. And lastly for the third one, this proposes a framework for the development of much better and more useful systems by integration of application-specific aspects into the development process.