Andrew J. Frost and Dr. Victor L. Ludlow, Ancient Scripture
History:
This project began as a class assignment for Dr. Ludlow’s Writings of Isaiah class. One of the sections that I found most helpful in Dr. Ludlow’s class was the section on poetic parallelism. Dr. Ludlow identifies a visual symbol of each of seven types of parallelism used by Isaiah. As my semester project, I wrote a stand-alone computer tutorial that taught each form of parallelism using the visual symbols given in class. The tutorial also included a self-quiz to assess the user s mastery of the subject matter. At the end of the semester, Dr. Ludlow approached me with the possibility of creating a Website based on this and other materials on Isaiah.
Audience/Purpose:
The main purpose of the Website is to assist students of Isaiah to understand his writings by providing supplementary reference material and learning aides. The primary audience of the Website is comprised of students, including those enrolled in Dr. Ludlow’s Writings of Isaiah class, and Church members around the world, including Gospel Doctrine teachers. The creation of the Website is especially timely, as the curriculum in Sunday School this year is based on the Old Testament and teachers will be teaching Isaiah shortly after the Website is on-line. The secondary audience includes anyone who is interested in Isaiah and would like to gain insight into his writings.
Responsibilities:
My role in the creation of the Website included two major responsibilities. First, I was to transfer my stand-alone tutorial on the seven forms of parallelism to a Web-based tutorial. Second, I was responsible for the overall design of the Site and the coordination of contributions from other students. One might say that I served as the Isaiah Webmaster. The majority of my time was spent writing a Java applet to implement the self-quiz at the end of the parallelism tutorial.
Technical Implementation:
The Website is located on Dr. Ludlow’s personal webspace on the Religious Education server hosted by University Computing Services. The HTML code for the WebPages was edited using Luckman’s WebEdit Pro 3.0 and transferred via FTP to the Religious Education server. The server that hosts the Religious Education Sites is currently running Novell NetWare server. Because the version of Novell NetWare being used does not automatically support long filenames, there was considerable difficulty in transferring the necessary files ending in *.class needed by the Java applet. Troy Blaser and Jim Saunders from University Computing Service provided considerable and much needed help.
The quiz applet required the most technical attention. The applet was written and debugged using Microsoft s Visual J++ in their Developer Studio environment. The quiz applet was written using Java version 1.0. While Java 1.1 offered some considerably improved features over Java 1.0, Java 1.1 is still not very well implemented in the more popular Web browsers, and not implemented at all in older versions. Considering our audience, the decision was made to use the more widely supported Java 1.0. While developing the quiz applet, attention also had to be given to the differences in Java Virtual Machines among different versions of different browsers. Sun Microsystems promise of writeonce, run anywhere did not ring entirely true. During development, the applet ran differently depending on the type and version of the Web browser. Handling these differences was the most challenging aspect of writing the quiz applet.
Site Content:
Under the direction of Dr. Ludlow, it was decided that the Site would be divided into the following sections: first, a brief introduction to Isaiah and his writings; second, a section detailing how and why to study Isaiah, based on a similar section from Dr. Ludlow’s book; third, a tutorial on the different forms of parallelism; fourth, a section detailing the historical setting of Isaiah s time; and fifth, a section outlining the major doctrines contained in Isaiah; and last, a list of outside resources to further help students study of Isaiah. Currently, the only section that remains to be implemented is the section detailing the major doctrines taught by Isaiah.
Future Development:
As mentioned above, at least one of the sections originally planned has not yet been implemented. Dr. Ludlow has expressed a desire to further tailor the Site to serve his students and act as a distance learning aide. As the Web becomes more and more popular, more and more students will choose to add to the content of the Site as part of their semester project. This new content will need to be added and managed.
Several exciting possibilities exist for further development of the Site. Currently, the quiz is written so that any changes to the content of the questions must be made inside the Java code and the applet must be recompiled. I have started to rewrite parts of the applet so that the questions can be read in from a separate file that could be modified by a teacher via an administrative WebPage. This change would allow the quiz to be used by any teacher as a self-quiz for any subject.
In my part-time work at the Instructional Technology Center, I have seen impressive new developments in the use of on-demand video. The possibility exists of video taping one of Dr. Ludlow’s lectures, annotating it and providing the video on-demand via the Internet. The student would be allowed to view the lecture from anywhere at anytime, and would be provided a table of contents that would allow him to jump to any point in the video. The video stream could also be edited so that as it plays in one corner of the student s browser, corresponding teaching aides would appear on the rest of the screen, including graphics, audio clips, and other video clips.
The possibilities are intriguing and I hope to continue work on the Site as it grows and develops.