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Direct Execution Learning Technology
Klaus P. Jantke
Fraunhofer IDMT, Children's Media Department, 99094 Erfurt, Germany
klaus.jantke@idmt.fraunhofer.de
Abstract. Technologies are pervading the daily life and are changing
the way in which humans learn from school through higher education and
vocational training to life-long learning. Peculiarities of the technology
determine the potential advantages of technology enhanced learning and
characterize the diculties, pitfalls, and risks of particular approaches.
Direct execution is a new paradigm emerging from the combination of
the direct manipulation idea with contemporary meme media technology.
Direct execution denotes the feature of media objects to be able to run
automatically when manipulated by humans and when sticked together.
Direct execution turns out to be an effective approach to exploratory
learning even in abstract domains such as, for instance, recursion theory.
Keywords: e-learning, exploratory learning, meme media technology,
direct manipulation, direct execution, instructional design, didactics.
1 From Memes by Meme Media to Direct Execution
Richard Dawkins has coined the term meme in his seminal book [8] to denote
units of non-biological evolution. Susan Blackmore [7] is providing some folklike
introduction into Dawkins' theory and its potential relevance to many domains.
Yuzuru Tanaka [30] has taken the initiative to carry over Dawkins' approach
to software technology where memes may be seen embedded in certain digital
representations. Tanaka has coined the term meme media . Meme media objects
considered to be digital containers, so to speak, of ideas when being in use may be
subject to replication, to mutation, to cross-over and, finally, to fitness criteria.
This contribution deals with memes in technology enhanced learning and with
the exploitation of meme media technology for technology enhanced learning.
Emphasis is put on the way in which memes or, more precisely, meme media are
manipulated within learning processes.
The paradigm of direct manipulation due to Ben Shneiderman [27] is known
to be advantageous when dealing with involved problems digitally (also [28,11]).
Direct manipulation means to treat objects on a computer screen just as these
objects were what they are intended to represent. Some objects are operational.
With an appropriate media technology at your fingertips, you may even make
those objects run. For this refinement (or specialization) of direct manipulation,
Jun Fujima and Klaus P. Jantke [9] have coined the term direct execution .
 
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