Multimedia Presentations

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

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eminding the child of how much he or she has learned -- and encouraging more study" (Gates, 1995, E5). Stokell, however, feels that this "click and learn" attitude doesn't "teach about certain subjects in any depth, they just touch on something superficially and then provide the links to move onto something related -- skimming the surface but not diving deeper into any real depth of learning (Stokell, 1998, Online). This raises an interesting question. Can a multimedia presentation enhance or enable "learning?" Indeed, the deeper philosophical question is "What is considered to be 'learning'" but that is without the scope of this analysis. For this analysis, we shall define "learning" as the increasing the ability to solve problems (Jones & Stone, 1989). Put another way, learning is the ability to discern which questions to ask. The emergence of multimedia materials for education coincided with a trend in education when educators were concerned with bringing "interest" back into the learning experience, and multimedia had the ability to do this -- but often at a cost. "The problem is, if one subject is being taught using multimedia, everything non-multimedia has the danger of appearing boring. To a generation of kids with s

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