WHY USE MULTIMEDIA?

A long time ago, experts claimed the invention of television robbed people of their imagination. At first, many people sat and listened to their TV sets, refusing to accept that the images were necessary. Similarly, educators lamented the increasing use of pictures and graphics in textbooks, declaring that it was "dumbing down" the curriculum. People comfortable with 1994-era Internet technology, like Lynx, Gopher, Veronica, and Email, soon discovered the Net was becoming very visual-based.  Multimedia today is a $226 trillion industry that essentially dominates the Internet and is an unstoppable force in almost all forms of communication or information transmittal.

Today's students have been raised on TV, VCRs, and video games. We know little of the impact this has had, but it is incumbent upon us as educators to work with it, and capitalize upon whatever visual literacy skills they have developed. Visual literacy makes use of some of the same components as reading and writing -- letters, words, spelling, grammar, and syntax. Just as there are common meanings for elements of verbal literacy, elements and common meaning exist for elements of visual literacy -- dots, lines, shapes, direction, texture, hue, and saturation. Pomona College has an excellent tutorial on the elements of visual literacy.

Given the highly visual nature of a new student generation, educators came to consider ways of incorporating multimedia into the classroom experience and supplementary learning exercises. Another reason was that educators wanted their students to have "real life" experiences, and real life is motion with sound and touch. When the multimedia craze hit big in 1996, it became apparent that the Internet pipeline just couldn't support the bandwidth for video and sound. A few schools jumped on the distance education bandwagon early, and created monster tutorials that took hours to download. There have been improvements in packet switching and compression since, but most educators remain happy to just have a web page with perhaps a small spinning graphic here and there. Gone are the grandiose visions of educational multimedia. Those visions need to be reclaimed.

Psychoacoustical research tells us the reason students don't listen during a traditional lecture class is because the human voice contains so much noise, wow, and flutter that the sensory system is overwhelmed with trying to interpret sounds that make no sense to the human ear anyway. The same is true of ordinary visual stimuli. By contrast, computer-generated multimedia uses what are called compression algorithms that remove much of the noise. Without much exaggeration, it could be said multimedia in education is like having a direct pathway into neural structures of the brain. Multimedia is like MP3 compared to CD quality, or DVD to VHS, or for really old timers, cassettes to 8-track tapes.

Data compression is but one way multimedia (sound, graphics, text, although with text, it's called encryption) can be delivered effectively, even over slow networks. Streaming technology is another.  RealPlayer (http://www.real.com/) tends to dominate this market, as it is the most commonly used helper application that buffers and simultaneously plays downloading file formats. RealMedia is historically associated with companies like Netscape and Apple Computers, two pioneers in the field of multimedia. Microsoft has been slow to catch up. The most recent craze is Shockwave and Flash (http://www.shockwave.com), common plug-in applications that makes animation more vivid.

The goal of multimedia, however, is not simply to make things more vivid. It's NOT about adding bells and whistles. Instead, it's about using technology intelligently and sparingly. Perhaps that is the strongest argument for its use in education. The principles of smart multimedia require knowing your audience, knowing when a graphic or animation will substitute for a video, knowing how to construct a visual introduction, knowing when to do close-ups, knowing what to focus on so it registers with the learner, knowing how to avoid distractions, and creatively finding ways to clearly portray the point you're trying to make.  Those are goals worthy of many educational endeavors.

INTERNET RESOURCES:
Webmonkey Multimedia Guides
CNet Builder.com's Multimedia Guides

Last updated: 11/7/01