Chapter 1. Getting Ready for Multimedia in Moodle

Multimedia is a very old human endeavor. And curiously, it all started with images, more than 30,000 years ago, painted by pre-historic humans on cave walls. The Chauvet caves and Lascaux caves, in France have the oldest paintings known to man (refer to the following image).

This was the first technology invented to express and capture not only the world we experienced through our senses, but also our imagination and creativity in a medium that could be shared with others.

When compared to these paintings, written text is quite recent, and it marks the beginning of History, more than 9,000 years ago (that's the reason we call the period before it the pre-History). After stone, papyrus was used in ancient Egypt, then parchment, and later paper, invented in China and brought to Europe in the 12th Century.

The 19th Century saw great developments in multimedia. From photography to motion pictures, from mass production of paper to the new process of printing images and text on the same page, all of it was invented during this time.

Ironically, it took mankind almost all of the 30,000 years since the paintings on cave walls to get a combination of text, image, sound, and video, all working in the same medium. The first motion pictures articulating all of these elements were first watched in the 1920's, with soundtracks, subtitles, and of course, pictures—still or moving.

The real revolution started with the advent of computers and the Internet, and later on the World Wide Web in the beginning of the 90's, and economically-accessible technology for the masses. And finally, after thousands of years of human history, we (not just an elite few) can now create multimedia easily, and share it without great effort. In a way, it's a new era for human imagination, creativity, and expression.

This book is about exploring these new possibilities for not only we teachers and educators, but also we students and learners, for teaching, learning, and imagining in new ways, in our everyday life. And of course, we will be using Moodle for all of this.

By the end of this chapter we will: