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<TITLE>Against Multimedia</TITLE>
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<H1>Against Multimedia</H1>
<CITE>Brian Harvey<BR>University of California, Berkeley</CITE>
<P>About 15 years ago, at the dawn of the personal computer era,
I attended a talk by one of the early leaders in educational
computing. The Votrax voice response unit had just been
introduced, and he was very excited about it. To demonstrate
the potential of this early multimedia technology, he first
showed a standard, boring arithmetic drill program. The
program presented a problem on the screen, the student would
type in an answer, and the program would either announce that
the answer was correct, and go on to the next problem, or
announce that the answer was wrong, and repeat the same problem.
<P>The speaker "improved" this program by using the voice response
unit to give messages such as "that's still wrong, but you're
getting warmer" for incorrect answers. The machine was able to
control the tone and syllable emphasis enough to present these
hints in an amusing fashion, and most of the audience was quite
entranced by this new technology.
<P>Unfortunately, the modified program's standard for "warmer" or
"colder" was nothing more sophisticated than the numerical
distance between the student's answer and the correct answer.
So, for example, if the problem was 6 times 8, and the student
first answered 42 (confusing this problem with the nearby
6 times 7), then answered 47 (a ridiculous answer), the program
would congratulate the student for getting "warmer." The result
is that the program was turned into a "guess my number" game,
and the idea of learning arithmetic was lost!
<P>Of course, the voice technology could have been used in more helpful ways
(for example, the program could have recognized common errors and given
messages such as "No, 42 is 6 times 7, not 6 times 8"), but the point of the
example is that this otherwise intelligent designer of educational software,
who would never have thought to use "warmer" and "colder" in the program's
printed messages, was so mesmerized by the new technology that he wasn't
thinking at all about the educational issues.
<P>Now move forward a dozen years. The new technology is laser disc
and CD-ROM. A leading multimedia researcher at Apple Computer
demonstrates educational applications; one example is a program
to teach physics students about levers. On the computer screen
is a depiction of a see-saw. Using the mouse, the student can
position three children, of different weights, at various positions
on the see-saw. The goal for the student is to get it to balance.
The see-saw is held in the horizontal position until the student
finishes placing the three children; then the student clicks a
button to release it. This is where the multimedia part comes in:
The developers have videotaped three actual children, with the
correct weight ratios, at all possible integer positions along
the length of an actual see-saw. If the student has put two children
at the same position, the actual children are seen in each other's
lap, or on each other's shoulders. It's fun to watch.
<P>Now imagine you're a student using this program. You've positioned
two children arbitrarily, and you're trying to figure out where to
put the third child so that the see-saw will balance. Most likely,
the correct position is not at an integer distance! This wouldn't
be a problem for the computer simulation alone, without the video
enhancement, but in fact the program had to be written to allow only
integer positions, because that's all they videotaped.
<P>What these examples have in common is that in their eagerness to use
the latest technology, both developers have actually made their programs
worse, from a pedagogic point of view. Multimedia is limiting! You
end up tailoring your work to the demands of the medium, rather than
the other way around.
<P>Multimedia is limiting in another way, also. Because good video is
difficult and expensive to produce, the range of ideas available is
restricted. One of the prototypical educational applications of
multimedia is to ask students to prepare a report on Martin Luther King
in which they use multimedia software to select and arrange excerpts
from available videodiscs. But the Martin Luther King presented by
Time-Life and by ABC News is the "I have a dream" integrationist,
the pacifist, the martyr -- not the socialist, not the angry militant,
not the multifaceted King that students could find in books. The
videos don't emphasize the FBI's spying on King's sexual activities,
nor the recent accusations of plagiarism in King's scholarly works.
Similarly, the ABC videos on the Gulf War are based essentially on
information provided by the United States government, some of which
has been shown to be inaccurate.
<P>Do all of these examples merely reflect the immaturity of the technology,
rather than inherent weakness? Perhaps, but only if slick, professional
video production will someday be as easy as computer programming is now. As
long as it takes dozens of skilled technicians to produce television shows,
the literature of multimedia will be limited. Of course there are better
examples, such as the "Voyage of the Mimi" project developed at Bank Street
College. (This project centered around a weekly broadcast TV show in which
the protagonists explored the world by boat; the broadcasts were supplemented
with a range of written material, interactive computer programs, and
classroom activities.) But that project took years to produce, using
federal research funds. And the result only teaches specific lessons; it's
not open-ended in the way that programs like Geometric Supposer (which
allows learners to perform geometric constructions on the screen; measure
the resulting lengths, angles, and areas; hypothesize general rules; and
test the hypotheses by repeating the construction with different starting
shapes), or programming languages like Logo (a dialect of Lisp designed
specifically for children learning mathematics, with simplified syntax and
with a variety of mathematical "microworlds" to explore, of which the best
known is turtle graphics), are open-ended. Therefore, the payoff for all
that money is quite limited, compared to non-multimedia computer software
development.
<P>It <EM>is</EM> possible to use multimedia technology in a more open-ended
way. <A HREF="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.04/sigg.kids.html">Coco
Conn</A>, for example, has done some spectacular work with kids and video, in
which the kids themselves plan and carry out the entire project, operating the
cameras and the video editors. If there is any promise at all in educational
multimedia, I think it's in that style of work. But it hasn't happened on a
large scale because it requires both expensive equipment and a lot of skilled
adult support. Even then, the kids' work probably won't be as slick as
professionally made video, so we may find that students will be tempted to
stick with the professional work rather than make their own, just as interest
in computer programming has declined because of the wide availability of slick
programs with graphical interfaces.
<P>Because multimedia revolves around video, it shares many of the
questionable properties of broadcast television: the emphasis on
visually strong news such as violence and disasters, the short
attention span, the focus on celebrities. People have argued for
many years about whether these things are necessary implications
of television, but even programs like Nova that attempt to be
somewhat scholarly use the quick-cut style, and show the faces of
Nobel laureates talking while the soundtrack gives us the simplified
platitudes of a narrator. The more honest media enthusiasts don't
even deny that a diet of television works against literacy; instead,
they're proud of it, describing print literacy as obsolete in the
light of the new "media literacy."
<P>Like much of the "information superhighway" that's been in the news
recently, multimedia provides the illusion of interactivity, in which
the user's control extends merely to a selection among professionally
prepared alternatives. Selecting images from an ABC News video is
essentially similar to the idea of the "electronic town meeting," in
which TV watchers can vote on choices presented by Al Gore and Ross
Perot. In a <EM>real</EM> town meeting, the decision-makers are the same
people who carry out the discussion and who invent the choices.
The electronic version is deeply antidemocratic.
<P>Why don't the same arguments apply to any educational use of computer
technology? My answer is that in some cases they <EM>do</EM> apply. The kind
of computer technology that presents a learner with multiple-choice
tests, or with "Computer-Managed Instruction," is indeed just as
limiting as multimedia technology. But computers lend themselves to
a different style of work, one in which learners are presented with
tools rather than with constraints. Word processing, spreadsheets,
calculators, and drawing programs can help learners explore and present
their own ideas. Most flexible of all is a programming language, in
which learners can invent their own tools. So far, at least, multimedia
is a much less accessible medium.
<P><ADDRESS>
<A HREF="index.html"><CODE>www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh</CODE></A>
</ADDRESS>
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