1. Instructional Animations: Examples of first-class educational Flash animations can be found at Nobel e-Museum, the official Web site of the Nobel Foundation. My favorite is the Blood Typing “game”, which teaches about blood groups, blood typing, and blood transfusions by having you do the work in a hospital emergency room. This is a beautifully interactive Flash animation, with likely malpractice lawsuits if you don’t get it right, but you get a chance to revive the patients. Absolutely do try this at www.nobel.se/medicine/educational/landsteiner/index.html.

2. Streaming Video: The video clips accessible from the Table below, located on the Indiana University Digital Media Streaming Server, illustrate issues of pedagogy, picture quality, and bandwidth.

First, to convince yourself that transmission of very high quality digital video over high-speed Internet connections such as those at Indiana University is now practical, play the movie preview of “I Am Sam” (compressed in RealVideo 9 codec) that I downloaded from the RealNetworks Web site and placed on the Indiana University Digital Media Streaming server. Play it full screen; does it look better than “broadcast (TV)-quality”?

Second, see Moving Atoms, ABC Evening News, October 24 1997 (8.3 MB) with text and closed captions added by Adam Allerhand, as an example of how digital video can help make the classroom interactive. The creation of this video clip has its own Step-By-Step section, Step-By Step: Creation of “Moving Atoms” Video Clip.

Except for “I Am Sam”, all video clips in the Table below started out in formats other than RealVideo. I converted them to RealVideo using Discreet Cleaner version 5.1.1 (for RealVideo 8) or 5.1.2 (for RealVideo 9).

Requirement: RealOne player, which can be downloaded free of charge from www.real.com/realone. CAUTION: The "FREE - DOWNLOAD NOW" link will ask for a credit card number and will download the premium option, free for 14 days but then $9.95/month. The link to the free version, "Free RealOne Player", is given in a smaller-size font. Note that some video clips were compressed with the newest RealVideo codec (RealVideo 9); if your Real player does not contain this codec, you will be prompted to download it.

NOTE: Even with streaming, a data rate of more than about 300 Kbps requires a high-speed Internet connection.  I have played all the clips of the Table below on the “768Kbps/384Kbps” DSL connection I have at home. The clips which have data rates of 300 Kbps or less play OK. For the ones with data rates of 400 Kbps and above, the sound is good but instead of video I see a series of still pictures.