GIUNTI Intenational Division (Italy)

From the authors’ perspective, technology is both a tool and a developing factor that can foster culture and learning development. This chapter focuses on the interrelations that interleave education, technology, content accessibility, and intercultural issues. With an introduction and related background, language learning is used as an example further to explain these issues. This chapter then discusses authoring and content development for e-learning applications (including authoring tools, virtual communities, and forums), and examines technology and accessibility issues in this context. The current state of e-learning is introduced along with a description of different tools and approaches. The chapter concludes with an overview of e-learning and the marketplace.

This paper proposes an open flexible learning oriented technological framework for interactive digital TV (iDTV). The framework is designed to satisfy the pedagogical requirements and deal with the iDTV capabilities and constraints. The framework includes two main products: the authoring tool, where the course is prepared and the course multimedia player, which is capable of presenting the course in an iDTV environment. The proposed approach has been validated in a simulation and real iDTV set-top box (STB) environment.