Well, it's certainly dusted off the list in the hot summer of Atlanta and given us something to think about other than those damned non-Aussies who keep winnin swimmin' medals.
Richard Hall [26 Jul 96] asks what would constitute "something useful?" Richard, I think that your previous research looks pretty interesting.
All of my previous research has been involved with cooperative learning strategies and alternative types of verbal/visual displays (on paper, not computers).
And, Hall points out...
...that I would not have been able to learn about these previous debates, or probably ever heard anything from researchers 50 miles down the road, much less Hong Kong, had it not been for (what seems to me to be a really powerful and important truck) the Internet.
Very true. I think that what is interesting is the ways students use these technologies to structure their own thinking and learning. Watching young students use multimedia tools to create presentations is a wonderful experience. K-12 is the really fascinating side of the Internet. Cooperative learning, distributed cognition (distributed with the computer, too), cognitive construction. The work of people like Dave Jonassen, Roy Pea, and Gavriel Salomon. These are far more rewarding fields for study than media taxonomy.
But even though there is a real, developing interest among researchers in student-centered approaches to learning, the education authorities still are doing their darndest to drag us back into the middle ages.
Last week we had an education scandal in Hong Kong--300 students were failed in their Chinese "A" level examinations (that's the end of school assessment) for regurgitating a memorized essay from a "cramming" school. (The owner of the cramming school happened to be a member of the examinations board, too.) Now, what chance multimedia in the classroom when we still assess children by their ability to memorize and not get caught?
Who was it said: The only successful learning strategy is cheating?