Educational Multimedia on Pacific History

Tracing our Ancestors: Educational Multimedia on Pacific History

The Media Centre at the University of the South Pacific has produced a CD-rom which follows the discovery of the islands of the Pacific by its first human inhabitants.

Entitled “Tracing Our Ancestors’’ the programme shows the routes these explorers took from Asia, travelling East across the Pacific Ocean and is presented in12 different languages used in the South Pacific. With the click of a mouse one will be able to hear the lesson in Fijian, Cook Islands, Maori, Kiribati, Marshallese, Nauruan, Niuean, Samoan, Pidgin, Tongan, Bislama, Hindi, English and French.

The user will also be able to view animations, study an outline for the lesson and test themselves on what they have learnt with an interactive quiz.

This CD-rom is the completion of a year-long research and development project funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

Mr Christopher Robbins of the Multimedia Unit who headed this project said that USP staff and students from many countries and academic departments pitched in to complete this project.

“All of the recordings were done by USP students,’’ said Mr Robbins.

“The programming was done primarily by Vignesh Shashidhar, a Computer Science student at USP and Thomas Rodgers, USP graduate, based on work collected by Ronna Pastorizo.’’

Mr Robbins thanked the many people who helped him out in the project in the areas of content development, instructional design, usability testing and general administrative support; research assistants; project administration and editing and proofing.

He also thanked USP’s Distance and Flexible Learning (DFL) staff and students who took time to talk to him; staff of the School of Humanities (SOH) and the Media Centre and all those who provided voice-overs and posed for photos and helped translate.

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