Week 6

Multimedia Learning – Richard E. Mayer—Chapter 14

A summary of Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning that puts forth five conditions for effective multimedia presentations: 1. Spacial contiguity, when related words and pictures are near each other on the page; 2. Temporal contiguity, when related words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively; 3. Coherence, which calls for extraneous words and pictures to be kept to a minimum; 4. Modality, when words are presented as speech instead of text; and 5. Redundancy, when words are presented as speech rather than speech and text. Three assumptions apply: learning involves separate visual and auditory channels; there is limited capacity in these channels; and meaningful learning requires actively selecting, organizing and integrating information.

These are good basic guidelines to keep in mind – and they also seem sort of obvious and common sense principles. Still, it’s good to have research to back up intuition. Another point made is that multimedia learning is more effective for some types of learners than for others. It is best for learners who are low in prior knowledge about the subject and for those who have high spacial ability.

Elements of Experience Design –Nathan Sherdoff

Provides a broad view of all the elements to consider when analyzing an experience or designing one. These include stages of an experience-- attraction, engagement and conclusion—as well as presentation and organization; visualization and design; and navigation, interactivity and creativity. The article is all theory and abstraction and thus kind of hard to plow through – but again provides a framework to help you think about experience design. This would be handy to refer to when working on a project.

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century—Jenkins White Paper

Really interesting exploration of the contemporary youth media culture, the challenges and issues it raises and how it is affecting society, education and young people. This is certainly a topic I have gotten to experience first-hand as a parent. I’ll offer a few observations of how the culture and experience of the internet has affected my daughter. First, she doesn’t have enough patience to read an entire book. She is used to getting information quickly and in short chunks. She has relied on Spark Notes her entire school career, much to her parents’ dismay. I will not claim that ALL teenagers do this, but I think many do – so many that even my daughter’s English teacher at one of the best public high schools in Manhattan said that she had given up on assigning novels. She was moving to short stories because she couldn’t get the kids to really read an entire novel.

My daughter’s social life was conducted largely online. She came home from school and went immediately online and stayed there for hours, just as we used to get on the phone with our friends. Then texting started and consumed even more time each day than Facebook. Only when my husband and I started using Facebook and texting ourselves did we start to understand how addictive they are and also how truly new and different online social life is. For my daughter, the experience of going away to college and leaving her high school friends is quite different than it was for previous generations because she can still be in constant touch with her old friends via Facebook and texting. Yet she can also watch them as they move on into a new life. When we visited her at college early in the semester, I noticed her looking at a friend’s Facebook page where he had posted photos of himself with his new college friends. I had a sense of how this may have been hard for her – to be connected to him and yet actually be able see him making new friends and possibly starting to move away from a close relationship with her. It sort of dramatized the fact that she was losing her old ties, or at least they were changing significantly. It struck me that this is really something new. It adds an element that has never been present in social life before--kind of a blending and blurring of old boundaries. It’s just a small example of the vast changes the Jenkins paper addresses.