ATDYW@ASUACAD.BITNET (06/13/91)
With all the recent advances in technology that allows us to integrate various media for desktop presentations, it seems the time is ripe for advanced thinks to begin looking at presentations a little differently. Currently, presentations are designed by the author, according to the author's opinions as to how ideas should be presented - what sequence, what media to use, etc. Educational psychologists tell us however, that we all have unique, individual "learning styles." We all have some optimal way of learning - some by hands on, some by listening, some by visual means, and so on. Imbedded within this is the notion that we all have some preferred ORDER in which the ideas should be presented to us. Some of us will learn better if ideas are presented in a forward sequence, others will learn better if presented in a backward (like back-chaining) sequence, others may prefer linear presentations, others may prefer trees. It would seem we should be able to use computers to accomodate any of these designs we could determine the opitmal media mix and optimal idea sequence for a target user/viewer/learner. I have conducted a few small experiments that suggest readers do in fact prefer different sequences of ideas. Is anyone else out there working on this? Any ideas? Can you imagine your favorite journal or magazine written tailor-made to optimize YOUR learning? What do we mean by "optimal?"
jt34@prism.gatech.EDU (THOMPSON,JOHN C) (06/13/91)
Has anyone studied optimal learning technolgy/presentation media? I was
wondering if some people respond best to video, others to still images, and
still others to text. How does one determine the optimum combination of these
medias for a given audience? Might we also consider allowing the student to
choose the media best suited for his/her learning style.
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THOMPSON,JOHN C
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
uucp: ...!{decvax,hplabs,ncar,purdue,rutgers}!gatech!prism!jt34
Internet: jt34@prism.gatech.edumilne@ics.uci.edu (Alastair Milne) (06/16/91)
In <31292@hydra.gatech.EDU> jt34@prism.gatech.EDU (THOMPSON,JOHN C) writes: >Has anyone studied optimal learning technolgy/presentation media? I was >wondering if some people respond best to video, others to still images, and >still others to text. How does one determine the optimum combination of these >medias for a given audience? Might we also consider allowing the student to >choose the media best suited for his/her learning style. I have seen this sort of question rather often, and unhappily, it makes an assumption which appears to be unfounded: That there *is* in fact such an optimum combination, and that an audience (i.e. collection of different people) will respond best to a particular version if it can only be discovered. What is much more likely is that the individual will respond best to different things; and that what is most effective for him/her will vary both over time and over subject matter. How to handle that? Make teaching material highly interactive, to the extent that it remains constantly (or at least continually) aware of the user's progress, and of what manner of difficulty the user is having at each point. A program that has this awareness can then respond with a whole series of different forms of assistance until, in most cases, a presentation is given which really addresses the user's difficulty. The overall effective of such an organisation is that the user winds up going through the program tending to see those things that are most useful for him/her as an individual, so the program looks very individualised. Lots of papers have been written on means of creating this degree of interactivity. Our own approach to it has been to make programs highly conversational, and avoid such extremely restrictive mechanisms as multiple choice. While this often sounds as if it needs quite a bit of help from Artificial Intelligence, it can in fact be handled quite effectively with judicious string-fragment matching. Notice I haven't said anything about multimedia. This is because this approach is useful no matter what the form of the delivery. What multimedia does (do?) for it is expand greatly the variety of assistance that can be given. If anybody is interested in papers on this subject, please e-mail me, and I'll see if I can get our director to send some of the many papers he has written on the subject. Alastair Milne, U. Calif. Irvine