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Design Page
Design Page
Design Page
Thomas Stinson
Created by Thomas Stinson on Jan 26, 2016 9:20 PM
I have been in education since 2010. Since I entered the profession, there has been a push to
integrate technology into classrooms. It does seem that students learn more effectively when
multimedia is used. Students in the information age have more technologically advanced tools to
explore, observe, participate, and present through the use of multimedia. These tools enable
students to learn by making the experiences with content in my opinion seem more authentic.
Moving forward multimedia will be driven by some of the design principles in the book, About
Face. Specially, that goal-directed interactions will reflect user mental models, and not
implementation models. I believe that this asserts that programs, software, and apps should be
flexible enough to adapt the intentions or desired outcome for the user.
During my elementary through high school years our multimedia consisted on videos, audio
recordings, and projections. It was not until my college years that I was exposed to multimedia
on a large scale. I must agree that media assisted with making more connections with the real
world and content knowledge. This is in my opinion the most important strength of multimedia
in education. It made a lot of the materials in Social Studies especially the conflicts, wars and
revolutions more relevant because of the action footage that we were watching in classes. Prior
to watching these real life occurrences, the multimedia learning consisted of verbal recounts or
collected literature. Also, in Science classes having the ability to view some of the specimens up
close thanks to attachments that enabled microscopes to connect to computers was vital to my
understanding of Biology. Before students were trying to identify organelles with pointers and
may have not been able to locate them prior to that particular attachment.
According to the article applying the Science of Learning: Evidence Based Principles for the
words and pictures (761). While taking a college history course in 2009, I experienced the most
exposure to multimedia based learning. During this same time, I noticed that some of my class
mates that were not as interested in history had associating different events in time that
represented similar circumstances. In particular, there was a discussion where the professor tried
to shed light the fact that states rights were a reoccurring theme in American history. The articles
suggest that in the science of learning integration of incoming materials must relate to existing
knowledge. Also, with some of the presentations especially around government where more
lecture-based and a lot of the information presented stirred off course of the learning objective.
Reference
Cooper, A., Riemann, R. Cronin, D. & Noessel, C. (2014). About Face: The essentials of
interaction design. (4th ed.). Indianapolis, IN: John Wiley & Sons.
Mayer, R. (2008). Applying the science of learning: Evidence-based principles for the design of
multimedia instruction. American Psychology, 63 (8), 760-769.