WK4 – Multimedia Technology & Education

This blog post will critique Multimedia Technology (MT) and how it can be used to foster student digital creativity and learning.

Mayer (2020) describes multimedia as “messages that consist of words (in spoken or printed form) and graphics (in static form such as photos or diagrams or dynamic form such as video or animation); multimedia instructional messages are multimedia messages that are intended to cause learning”.

Fig 1.1 shows the various Free Web-based Learning Technologies resource from Bower & Torrington (2020).

Using MT in education allows students control over their learning and offers students choices from various forms of media that suit students' learning preferences and interpretation of the content to enhance learning effectiveness (Lau et al., 2014). For example, students could use MT learning technologies, like the digital storytelling website, ‘StoryboardThat’ to foster creativity and understanding of content (accessed here https://www.storyboardthat.com/).

The MT, StoryboardThat, could be used to enhance students’ creativity to understand concepts from the NSW K-10 English Syllabus (NESA, 2022). A Stage 3 designed task such as ‘Using StoryboardThat, create a short about a cultural celebration you do not celebrate yourself, and present your story to the class’. This task closely aligns with the syllabus outcome EN3-OLC-01; ‘communicates to wide audiences with social and cultural awareness, by interacting and presenting, and by analysing and evaluating for understanding’. This task would allow students to creatively design their own multimedia project where words and pictures are used to enhance the stories meaning.

Fig 1.2 StoryboardThat about a typical day in Ramadan – a great example of what students could create in this task (resource from https://www.storyboardthat.com/storyboards/c029eab8/unknown-story)

Check out this 12-minute video on how to use StoryboardThat for kids!!!

However, whilst using MT to foster creativity in students’ learning has many benefits, there is also extensive research that infers that the implementation of multimedia may have various effects on learners. Research from Tabbers et al., (2001) claims that multimedia instruction consisting of verbal and pictorial information places high demand on the working memory load because the learner has to switch between text and pictures in order to integrate them mentally. Their research states that to reduce this memory load, the verbal information should be presented auditorily instead of visual text along with the images, this is called the modality principle - an example of this can be seen in Fig 1.3 (Tabbers et al., 2001).

Fig 1.3 Diagram showing the modality principle; the left side is the image with audio text, the right side shows image with visual text (resource from Bower, 2023)

References

Bower, M., (2023). Multimedia and Creativity [PowerPoint Slides]. Macquarie University.

Bower, M., & Torrington, J. (2020). Typology of free web-based learning technologies (2020). EDUCAUSE digital library.

Lau, R. W., Yen, N. Y., Li, F., & Wah, B. (2014). Recent development in multimedia e-learning technologies. World Wide Web, 17, 189-198.

Mayer. (2020). Designing multimedia instruction in anatomy: An evidence‐based approach. Clinical Anatomy (New York, N.Y.), 33(1), 2–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/ca.23265

NSW Educations Standards Authority (NESA). (2022). English K-10 Syllabus. https://curriculum.nsw.edu.au/learning-areas/english/english-k-10-2022

Tabbers, H. K., Martens, R. L., & Van Merrienboer, J. J. (2001). The modality effect in multimedia instructions. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 23, No. 23).

Relevant Links

https://www.storyboardthat.com/storyboards/c029eab8/unknown-story