Understanding McLuhan CDROM

The award winning Southam/Voyager CDROM on Canadian Media Guru, Marshal McLuhan, featured a set of interactive tools by Dan Zen unparalleled to date and perhaps since.

A highlight bar followed the lines in the transcript as audio and video played. You could click any line in the transcript and the audio or video would synchronize. There was a video show library that would let you see all the videos together and navigation was provided to you jump to the video in context. There were customizable bookmarks that were exportable and importable so teachers and students could share marks. A notepad allowed you to save text notes or paste in text from the disc and again the notes could be exported and imported. All these and more were on floating panels which were collapsible and controlled either with hot key or with a tool bar menu.

The disc also featured interactive games and artscapes to emphasize key theories of McLuhan. A set of Vocal snips of McLuhan were used to indicate wrong answers to the amusement of many.

The Web site provided a CD ROM feel by downloading all the pages in one big grid page. Then the name anchor was used to jump both vertically and horizontally between "pages". Unfortunately, when Internet Explorer came along, it did not jump horizontally and browser testing was required to display a modified site.