Multimedia: providing students with real world experiences

Multimedia has been quickly accepted by the engineering community. In the first part of the paper, the author provides a theoretical explanation why multimedia is popular in engineering: because it tries to provide an artificial “being-in-the-world” experience. This explanation is backed-up by Heideggerʹs philosophy and Winogardʹs critique of artificial intelligence (AI). Heidegger believed that humans basically act pre-reflectively, depending on the situation into which they are thrown. Such decisions are based on common sense and intuitive knowledge accumulated while “being-in-the-world”, and particularly during breakdowns. Engineering students have few opportunities to observe breakdowns, however, information technology, particularly virtual reality and multimedia provide them. In the second part of the paper, a system to teach earthquake engineering is presented, based on the principles of breakdown-oriented learning. The system is built around a multimedia database that contains digitised photographs of damages caused by some of the recent major earthquakes. To a large extent, such multimedia tools can replace the learning from real breakdowns and complements theoretical knowledge that can be passed on using traditional means.