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Logo and Hypermedia


At a workshop about a dozen years ago Robert Knight of the Lubbock, Texas Public Schools showed his Logo multimedia creation. Written in Terrapin Logo for the Apple II, it told a tale of a frog in a lily pond. The triangular turtle not only drew the scenery but was also an actor in the story. The narration, complete with musical accompaniment, came from a cassette tape recorder sitting next to the Apple.
We've come a long way since then. With the advent of MicroWorlds, Logo has evolved into a full-featured hypermedia authoring program. And coming from the multimedia side, HyperStudio has incorporated Logo as its resident programming language.  

The use of Logo for creating multimedia projects received a boost back in 1986 with the introduction of LogoWriter. Several features of LogoWriter combined to make it especially suitable for storytelling and reporting. Text could be written directly on the screen and edited as with any other word processor. Carrying on a tradition developed in earlier versions of Logo, the four LogoWriter turtles could take on a variety of ready-made or user-created shapes and move around the screen as birds, dancers, or space ships. Turtle shapes could also be "stamped" to add to a background drawn using turtle graphics.
But there's more to multimedia than mixing media. For thousands of years people saved data and told stories in scrolls, friezes, and books, all of which forced a linear organization. Electronic storage frees us to read and write in nonlinear ways. Point at a word or picture and you jump to another part of the document. The path you follow through a document may be different today than it was yesterday, and someone else will follow yet another route. The software can remember where you've been so you can backtrack.
This approach, familiar to anyone who has used HyperCard, a CDROM encyclopedia, or the World Wide Web, was originally known as "hypertext" when computer documents were only text. It evolved into "hypermedia" as graphics, sound, and moving images were added. The term "multimedia" lacks the important reference to hyperlinking, but has become commonly used to refer to hypermedia environments.
Two features of LogoWriter make it a natural hypermedia environment. First, a Logo project is organized as a collection of pages. In this electronic scrapbook the order of the pages doesn't matter. You can go from one to another via any path you choose. Second, text on the LogoWriter screen is "active." As in any word processor, you can select an area of text and then cut or copy it. But LogoWriter goes beyond this. The primitive selected reports the selected text. If the word you select is the name of a LogoWriter page, then the command getpage selected takes you to that page. Thus, pages may be linked directly to words in a body of text. With a little programming, you can create a system in which putting the cursor on a word and pressing Control-Something sends you off to another page.
Andy David wrote such a program almost as soon as LogoWriter hit the street. Over the next several years Eadie Adamson and I developed similar programs, which we used with her fourth and fifth graders at the Dalton School in New York City. Eventually our work was published in 1991 by LCSI as LogoWriter Hypermedia Tools for use with the Apple II version of LogoWriter. But by then the world was moving on to the Macintosh / Windows style of interface, and LogoWriter was not.

Source:  http://el.media.mit.edu/