Manipulable Inter-Medium Encoding and Learning (An Extended Abstract)

I intend to focus on an analysis of user activities and the nature of learning in an emerging, and I believe, significant, subclass of multimedia computer systems. Systems in this subclass have two main characteristics. Firstly, the user is presented with an encoding formed in one medium (which I call the external medium) which refers to an encoding another medium (which I call the base medium). Secondly, the user is allowed to perform manipulative operations on the former encoding (the external encoding), these operations being constrained in such a way so as to ensure that the operations themselves, or the outcomes of those operations, represent operations or outcomes on the latter encoding (the base encoding). Such a set up I call a Manipulable Inter-Medium Encoding (MIME).