The work on the project was almost complete. Stephen's database contained all the information he had collected in his investigation of `the old coal mines of South Wales'. His father had worked down the village pit in Cefn Rhondda right until it closed in late 1992. His father and the neighbours had been a huge source of knowledge and much of the Xmas vacation had been spent talking to them. Stephen had also made several sketches and had taken many photographs. All were now scanned in and available to him. His text was written really and he was just adding references and links to his diagrams and pictures. The arrival of easy to use hyper media systems had dramatically changed the way students handed in work. The most important development in this area had been tools for authors that had suddenly managed to present the correct metaphor. It really was now as quick to produce a hyper document as it was to produce old fashioned word processed documents. The main difficulty now was handling audio input. This was a common problem with teaching materials too and was one of the main reasons why students worked more in study bedrooms and less in communal terminal rooms. Private audio output was easy, you just used headphones, but audio input had proved a more difficult problem. The problem lay in two areas. Physically, even the best sound hoods really did not work too well. It was a problem that language laboratories had tried to solve for years but we still had no solution. If only the audio equivalent of tele-kenesis could be made to work.... The worst problem though was psychological. People just felt silly talking to machines when their colleagues could overhear them! Stephen had soon edited together the material and added the `voice overs'. He decided to read it through later, before submitting it through the electronic messaging system to his assessor at Sussex. It seemed very silly to think of the days when mailing word processed documents was hard let alone multimedia!