ARE MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION MATERIALS
MORE TRAINING-BASED THAN TEACHING BASED?
Two headlines, three years apart, provide a good framework for this analysis. The first headline, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on March 5, 1995, proclaimed "Computer learning offers unlimited possibilities for the future." The second headline, on a syndicated editorial from Newsbytes on January 27, 1998, questioned, "Are We Creating a Video-Game Generation?" Referring to the 1995 article, we find the statement "When a child's questions are answered in an engaging way, the questions keep on coming. . .But if an adult is too busy or can't answer a question, or if a textbook fails to meet a child's particular needs, curiosity often withers. When curiosity is frustrated time after time, the pleasure and incentive to learn may be lost" (Gates, 1995, 2D). To be fair, the author of this quote is Bill Gates, a man who has been in the news recently because of his software company, most of it multimedia. Ian Stokell, editor of Newsbytes Network, suggests three years later,
The more kids are exposed to video games, computer games, and multimedia programs, where something new happens just a click away, the more the danger that they are incapable of focused attention in a non-computing environment. Kids are bombarded constantly with external images and options to immediately move on to something else if they are not sufficiently stimulated in the first few seconds of something new (Stokell, 1998, Online).
Both of these gentlemen, one a creator of the current scene, and one, a critic of the current scene, present valid arguments, as far as they go. This paper will analyze these arguments.
It can be argued that, historically speaking, cultures regularly face major turning points in their social makeup, events that have an impact on every other element of a culture's makeup. The mass media scholar can trace how writing enhanced speech, printi...