Lloyd Rieber seems to be "ticked off" at Ken Burns, the history film-maker, because he views Mr. Burns as biased or prejudiced in favor of the New York Yankees and against Lloyd's beloved Pittsburgh Pirates. Lloyd, you're forgetting that history is not science......it's a point-of-view. (Some might argue that science is also a "point of view.") This is an important distinction that relates to the use of hypermedia/multimedia in education.
Lehrer (1993) describes the development, use, and results of a hypermedia construction tool called HyperAuthor that was used by eighth graders to design their own lessons about the American Civil War. Students in the Lehrer study were high and low ability eighth graders who worked at the hypermedia construction tasks for one class period of 45 minutes each day over a period of several months. The students worked in a media center of the school's library where they had access to a color Macintosh computer, scanner, sound digitizer, HyperAuthor software, and numerous print and non-print resources about the Civil War. An instructor was also available to coach students in the conceptualization, design, and production of the hypermedia programs. Students created programs reflecting their unique interests and individual differences. For example, they created hypermedia about the role of women in the Civil War, the perspectives of slaves toward the war, and "not-so-famous people" from that period. According to Lehrer (1993), "The most striking finding was the degree of student involvement and engagement" (p. 209). Over the course of the study, both high and low ability students became very task-oriented.
Lehrer's study also included a quasi-experimental comparison between these students and a control group of students who had studied the Civil War via traditional classroom methods during the same period of time. At the end of the treatment period, both groups were given an identical teacher-constructed test of knowledge. No significant test differences were found. Lehrer conjectured that "these measures were not valid indicators of the extent of learning in the hypermedia design groups, perhaps because much of what students developed in the design context was not anticipated by the classroom teacher" (p. 218).
However, a year later, important differences were found when students in the design and control groups were interviewed by an independent interviewer unconnected with the previous year's work. Students in the control group could recall almost no historical content related to the Civil War, whereas students in the hypermedia design group displayed elaborate concepts and ideas that they had even extended to other areas of history, e.g., the Vietnam War. Most importantly, although students in the control group defined history as the record of the facts of the past, students in the design class defined history as a process of interpreting the past from different perspectives.
In my opinion, this last finding is wonderful. (Of course, given that we are scientists and not historians, I should not be too enthusiastic about the results until the study is replicated again and again!) But think about it. The kids in the control group didn't learn much historical content, and most distressingly, they continued to think about history as a factual record of the past. The hypermedia kids, on the other hand, retained some historical knowledge and most importantly, thought like historians, i.e., they recognized that history is prejudiced, biased, and definitely told from a point of view, just like Mr. Burns, the famous film-maker turned historian!
Lloyd, you wrote: " I am reasonably certain that Ken Burns sincerely meant to show an objective, balanced account of the Civil War and Baseball." Wrong! He meant to present history from his point of view. Rather than lamenting the fact that Mr. Burns told the story of the 1960 World Series from the Yankees perspective, we should celebrate it. And if you disagree with Burns' interpretation, you are free to create an alternative account from the Pirates viewpoint. (There would surely be a market for such a program in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania!) Or better yet, why not encourage a group of students to analyze and critique Burns' film, digitize parts of it, and present their own multimedia rebuttals or support for Burns "history." Now that would be beautiful!
Lehrer, R. (1993). Authors of knowledge: Patterns of hypermedia design. In S. P. Lajoie & S. J. Derry (Eds.), Computers as cognitive tools (pp. 197-227). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.