THE DIGITAL NEWS SYSTEM AT EDUCOM - A CONVERGENCE OF INTERACTIVE COMPUTING, NEWSPAPERS, TELEVISION AND HIGH-SPEED NETWORKS

Newspapers and television are excellent vehicles for rapid information distribution. Besides being timely, newspapers are interesting because they are under user control-one can easily browse through a paper and select stories of interest. Similarly, the combination of motion video and sound makes television a powerful mechanism to rivet one's attention and to permit effective learning. Nevertheless, both newspapers and television have their drawbacks. Newspapers lack the dynamism of video and film, and television is inherently passive; we cannot change the fixed linear ordering of the information, nor can we easily navigate through the information to learn precisely what we want to know. In addition, each medium has some of the best attributes lacking in the other.