EDUGRAPHICS'97
Third International Conference on Graphics Education
COMPUGRAPHIS'97
Sixth International Conference on Computational Graphics and Visualization Techniques
December 15-18, 1997
Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal.

Edited by GRASP - Graphic Science Promotions & Publications. ISBN 972-8342-02-0.

ACI-ENSC
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Allowing the problematic of multimedia education by new technologies integrated in every discipline, the PolyAgogic CyberSpace is a "VOLUNTAry Textured and Integrated System" (PACS VOLUNTATIS) where the pupil, the students and the pupil-teachers, helped and animated by disciplinary teachers or professional workers, are successively spectators, spect-actors and actors in an amphitheater with immersive screen and simulators for designing the trans-disciplinary courses by an interactive multimedia product on immersive screens, on CD-ROM and on Web-server in intranet or internet connected with other laboratories, libraries and class rooms, in the globality of the information or the locality of there own culture. The relationships of the information are self-organized in an interactive and scriptable database to help and support the multimedia creation.

Key Words : Education, polyagogy, numerical virtual, amphitheater, immersive, interactive, visual, multimedia, simulation, spect-actor, Musearium, engineering of concepts, SGBDR, motion capture, teaching, learning, training, living, imaging.

The purpose of this research is to give the word to the image and the image to the word and both, with feedback, to its first human abilities : the imaginary as mental virtual in connection with the numerical Virtual and the imagination as engine of training by the creation. It is to tell :

• the imaginary in a scholastic and pedagogical arousing context by the articulation concrete-abstract-virtual ; then an environment where the imagination works with the experimental know-how and the reading-writing.
  
• the imaginary as engine, productor and fields of gradients and influences, creating forces of voluntary, spontaneous and targeted projects, ideas, realizations and productions.

  This is equally to emit the hypothesis of a necessity of a complementary work tool adapted to the multi (several in the same time and space) and pluri (several, each near the others) disciplinary pedagogy in network, source of ergogenesis allowing :
  

• the articulation concrete-abstract-virtual that puts information in relationships between the local and the global, in a multimedia relational database, to give a dynamic relief to the different cultures and by the network effect, as much human as numerical, to texture functional, perceptual and conceptual relationships in order that organize the relativist relational texturologies (Saint-Jean P., 1989), natural and social that structure the thought, the deeper mind.
  
• to be found in a place of training between teachers, students and professionals then the evening in Agora, with professionals and parents wanting to train themself to a new praxis and any other spectators of the general public wanting to go in quest of new expressions of the culture.

In 1974-77, I have used the concept of polyagogy and the interactivity for the conception of the first interactive computer system for the musical and visual composition and creation on mini-computer (Saint-Jean P., 1977) using disciplines as mathematics, design, physics, architecture, geometry, acoustics and arts.

Fig. 1 : Polyagogy in the numerical unimedia virtual.

And then the Compositor I. Xenakis has given it the name of UPIC (Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu, Polyagogic Computer Unit for the Center of Study on Musical Mathematics and Automatic). Few device were distribute in the world and more now in the new version on micro-computer.

Fig. 2 : Polyagogic Computer Unit.

In 1994, my preoccupation has been to define the perspectives of the teaching of the 3D in Education. The solution brings an answer to the question : how to teach and learn a large quantity of information with quick memorization and understanding, living the knowledge and the know-how in its own imaginary per the multimedia and simulating numerical virtual ? Thus the polyagogy should be teached and learned in a amphitheater with visualization and simulation of the concepts in different disciplinary fields (Saint-Jean P., 1994).

Fig. 3 : Polyagogic amphitheater for the numerical Virtual.

An other concept of polyagogy was used with my co-worker J. Bollot, in 1995 for the conception of the CyberNavire (CyberShip) in the Polynesia islands to answer the question : how teaching, learning and training in a class room where people live in few small too far islands ? The solution was a double-bottomed ship, sailing between the islands with computer platform room, multimedia and Internet Network with satellites.

The same year an other project has been concepted with my co-worker Wall>Ich to give an answer about the problematic which is defining by the collation of the local aspect defined by a variety of cultures and the globality of the information with Internet. That has been accelerated in there evolution by the new technologies. And the AME project (Arts et Mutations Electroniques, Arts and Electronic Mutations) has been concepted with a Cybermobile and Mediamobile, using a big trailer INOX 01 designed by Jean Nouvel, an electronic and computer platform twisted, wired and connected up for the multimedia numerical virtual teaching.

Why the PolyAgogic CyberSpaces ?

With the notions of CyberSpace and network, the polyagogy increases its concept by the opening up of a new world, a relational world between the local and the global, necessary and may be essential for the evolution of the democratic reflection.

It was the opportunity to redefine the concept of polyagogy not in terms of local, individual and personal device but in terms of global, collective and networking device to link concrete, abstract and virtual actions in a same project using the information of several disciplines. It is also the possibility to include human factors, social situations, design, ecological and health components. It is in fact to set the problem of education through the new technologies.

In other words, the PACS is a project which give us some replies to a crisis of a society in full evolution and especially a tool of questionment by the praxis. In this case, the solutions are not only given directly by the reasoning with the language but also by the simulation, true to life in the imagination mind, the multisensorial thought, propitious to give the intuition, complementary to the deduction, in the virtual multimedia reasoning. And thus propositions and choices could be done and effective in the concrete and in the abstract.

This project is planned :

• to have an application in the project of the Village Educational of Pomona in California ; that try to demonstrate it will be possible to integrate the new technologies in creating a Virtual School connected with 1000 class-rooms in 40 establishments managed by Los Angeles County of Education. The problematic is to be near the public to offer the new technologies as an interactive show,
  
  
  Fig. 4 : An integration in a super market near the today public.
  
  
  Fig. 5 : How to change the passivity of the spectator by replacing one of the four Cinemas by a PACS for an active audience.
  
  
  Fig. 6 : The back enter of the super market as a school enter.

• to constitute a team about the question : what means the PACS for the teaching and learning of different languages and different cultures,
  
• to transform a movie theater with big screen in a PACS for educational entertainment,
  
• to give proposals for the European Program Commission Esprit, on Intelligent Information Interfaces (i3) calling on Experimental School Environments.

Its objectives have been to put in agreement with :

• the need to make evolve a crisis where the institutional and ancestral tradition has gradually us trenched in the reductionism word-document, putting in before restrictive human abilities of the memory and the recitation, specializing and minimizing the gesture by the repetition. Thus a sort of intellectual taylorisme has followed the manufacturer taylorisme of the beginning of the century. What has made forget on the one hand that it could exist a capable alternative to create utopias where concepts no longer show only of the pure mind, but well by the transit of the idea and the affect to the concept and to the percept, then of the concept and the percept to the virtual, place of the processing of the imaginary information, and finally of the virtual to the concrete. And on the other hand that human processes are generally retroactive and necessitate a return of the concrete to the abstract to insure the control of quality corresponding to successive and first wills, and by successively looping to develop a collective or personal multi-sensorial, multimedia and multi-cultural reflection with linked and textured information, warranty by the praxis. Thus this one generates a philosophy and a so personal intelligence that collective propitious to the understanding and to the creation.
  
• the addition of the processoral to the professorial in the process of education.
  
• the conservation of it acquired by the pedagogical theorical and practical research on the sensory awakening that, since more of 30 years, has been associated to disciplines based on the lecture, the perusal and the handwriting of a specific language, to their in express all the artistic components jointly of those scientific, technical and literary.
  
• the exploitation of the globality in relationship with local cultures to create the network effect that provokes the will of communication in and by the virtual where the information is self or interactively textured and where each has need all and all of each.
  
• the complementation to the concrete that makes that whole is technical and to the abstract that makes that whole is language, by the virtual that existing in all disciplines in explaining that whole is image, imaginary and multimedia, and that it is a interdisciplinary unimedia allowing, by the multimedia and pluri-media expression, the communication trans, multi and pluri-disciplinary therefore susceptible to form products, methods and polyagogic expressions.
  
• the importance that have disciplinary fields to specify and to localize the multimedia information.
  
• the increase of the number of disciplines that becomes too heavy in time and in organization for the school.
  
• the importance of trans-disciplinary fields to favor the understanding of the relative complexity in a global vision.
  
• the growth of the quantity of the multimedia differentiated and specialized information, that it can be useful to assimilate to manage a world unceasingly more complex where the climatic, biological and environmental hostility, can become increasingly harmful for the humanity.
  
• the growth of the gap between the scholastic middle and the professional middle.
  
• the need to whole know and to whole understand to no longer believe in a simple surviving but to a personal and social life quality.
  
• the need to reply to the question : what new tools favoring new methods, new modes of pedagogical expression, to generate new collective and individual thinks and whose unite them can interfere to others by the virtual and human interactivity favoring the collective intelligence, as thinks Pierre Levy but as individual that integrates the place in the globality and the right to the personality, to the difference.
  
• finally to put in agreement with a simple will that the exhibition is to school and non only in the street.

STRUCTURE

Composition of the PACS as Installation

The PACS VOLUNTATIS is composed of an amphitheater with seven interest and activity areas structured in three groups :

Tiers

• For spectators, where the look asserts and refines fitted to the observation and to the analysis.
  
• For spect-actors, where, supplied seats to sensory and mechanical simulation, the action of the hand associates to the look to observe, pilot, govern its space of local knowledge in the discovery of the globality of knowledge and know-how to in extract sensations, ideas, movements that will form functions, percepts and concepts.
  
• For actors, supplied computer devices, where the body, the soul and the spirit conceive and express the polyagogic information.

Fig. 7 : Side View of the PACS.

Fig. 8 : Over View of the PACS.

Simulators

Fig. 9 : Polyagogic CyberShip of the numerical Virtual.

• To insure the trip, the path, the ride in complex worlds of the information.
  
• To insure the layout and the specific trace in complex worlds, with the return in looping (forward to the past to be back to the future).
  
• To bring after the "do-it yourself" and the "kit it yourself", the "live-it yourself and together".

• a local cyber space fitted to the capture of movements (motion capture) and to the gestual and corporal, individual or in group, real or metaphorical expression,
  
• a computerized console of the 9 Muses which is ancient, sensorial, disciplinary or contemporary cyber,
  
  
  Fig. 10 : The computer console of the nine Muses, the nine disciplines.

• a computerized console of the polyagogic expression where each Muse is visualized alone on one screen, or separately together in few screens, or mixed together on the one large linked screen,
  
  
  Fig. 11 : The polyagogic computer console.

  The whole space under-tended by two optically corrected screens insuring the immersion in multisensorial and multimedia space of the knowledge. And on the other hand linked to laboratories-workshops and class-rooms by network cable or via satellites.

Each participating people could have a credit card (financial, cultural, pedagogical) that would give the possibility to have a virtual personal space on disk and to participate in the collective space. At this time he uses technical, pedagogical and social functions and proposes its own information, its reflections, its points of view and its trips in participating to different projects as actor, spect-actor or simply spectator.

Technical functions

• The acquisition and the pretreatment of the multimedia information to leave from the network, (television, documents, transparents, slides, video, VCRs, 2D, 3D, motion capture) with management of the casting, contracts and rights of author.
  
• The processing of the multimedia information.
  
• The analysis of the multimedia information.
  
• The Design and the synthesis of the multimedia information.
  
• The presentation and representation of the multimedia information by the Design of interactive interfaces for numerical screen and for simulator.
  
• The Cybernetics of the multimedia information with loop (feedback) processing choices and decisions on simulators.
  
• The interactive or programmed storing in multimedia database.

  Fig. 12 : A self-organized multimedia database for the engineering of multimedia concepts.
  

• The polyagogic conceptual engineering with base them on interactive multimedia database, off-line or on-line, in internet or intranet.
  
• The staging.
  
• The experimentation and the demonstration.
  
• The simulation and the control of process.
  
• The workshop, round tables and the alive spectacle.

• The educative spectacle for the presentation, the representation, the demonstration of different disciplinary areas and discussion on differences of object, subject and project and value and nature differences in terms of perception, sensation, fondness, idea, expression, communication of the space-time and multidimensional spaces of the knowledge. A diverting project can-be the expression of the answer to the question : The Ancient Zeus recognizes-it its own daughters that have become CyberMuses (Clio, Euterpe, Thalie, Melponem, Tepsichore, Erato, Polymnie and Uranie). Would have-they the same characters, the same capacities and how could have-they to participate in changes of our world as they have made it in their time?
  
• To connect schools and universities to project the future in the mind of youths.
  
• To favor both with collective and individual manner, the observation, the analysis, the construction and deconstruction, the apprenticeship, the research, the organization, the placement in form and the setting, the conception, the distribution, the processing, the simulation and the pretense, the conceptualization, the abstraction, and the virtualization.
  
• The meaning, the articulation and the differentiation of the concrete, the abstract, and the virtual as well as the non-realism, the realism and the trans-realism with passages of one to the other by the concretization, abstraction and the virtualization.

• The collective and individual work and the collective intelligence, individual and alive.
  
• The integration and relationships between the local and the global of multimedia information for the understanding of cybernetics process in the family, the city, the country and states.
  
• The connectivity between schools, universities and manufacturers to insure transitions and relationships between the training by the instruction, by the research and the industrial work.
  
• The virtual enterprise : as interconnection and interactivity between the local enterprise (families, masons, artisans) and the global enterprise (international groups).
  
• The therapy of group for the health.

The polyagogy is a non unique and complementary solution to the disciplinary pedagogy. It is indispensable to insure the conceptual perceptual and functional evaluation and the self-organization of the phenomenological knowledge and the processoral know-how by adaptive aggregation and dispersion of the texturing information. What optimize regularly and continuously the efficiency and the pedagogical wealth in generating by network effect and by self-regulated reflection and imagination, new goals, new projects, news potentialities, and new projections of the future insuring a progressive actualization that is the fundamental and essential property of the Virtual.

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