[quoting Cornell, 21 Oct 96] I agree with Chris Brack relative to the notion that not all content to be learned deals with factual regurgitation--that there must be more to cognition than that--and Chris makes his point nicely.
I never asserted that learning is LIMITED to factual memory. However, factual memory is surely a kind of learning and therefore if someone asserts that "media don't influence learning" then factual learning must be included in the things that aren't influenced.
Incidentally, I don't like the stigmatization implied by the word "regurgitation." If you have ever tried to learn a foreign language you know you have learn the words for tulip, Belgium, hinge, and trout. This type of learning should not be scorned. It is absolutely necessary and it is not so easy.
Having also made an attempt at learning Mandarin, I wonder if the materials, exercises, and audiotape repetition of vocabulary Steve was provided...
If you go back and reread what I wrote you will see that this was not the content of the lessons we had.
But anyway, Clark's hypothesis was not that media have no influence on GOOD lessons, but that they have no influence on any lessons, whether good or bad.
...might not have been perceived quite differently had the instructor showed video clips of contemporary Chinese language "in situ" and with all the local color and mystique of a local bazaar in Beijing, or if he had had a chance to get tutoring assistance from someone who was fluent in both English and Mandarin? It sounded as if the Mandarin class had much the same objectives as one covering physics or organic chemistry, with loads of facts to learn but little context.
Right. Change the content and you change the lesson. But my point was that the same old boring grammar explanations would have been easier to learn if they had been presented on paper instead of on tape.
[quoting Hall, 21 Oct 96.a] I would speculate that it has to do with the amount of control associated with the written text. That is, students' can control the speed of their reading, they can focus more on a section they don't understand, and skim over sections they do, etc.--more "metacogntive" awareness. Even if they would have been allowed to control the speed of the tape, they probably still wouldn't have had the control they had when reading.
I suspect you are right. There is no question that we can control the rate of input from written text, whereas, we are at the mercy of the speaker's speaking rate and intonation. This may explain it completely. When we are reading we can slow down if something is difficult and speed up if it is easy. Our peripheral vision provides some additional information, even if it is only the approximate length of the sentence, so we can anticipate how much is still to come. English intonation gives some clues to this also, but probably less. Thus the superiority of text over audio for learning may be due to the greater "control" the learner has over text. Note that in my experiment, the learners saw only one sentence at a time and had no control over the viewing time, but even under those unnatural conditions they were clearly superior.
[quoting Wager, 21 Oct 96] If we buy the notion that learning is a function of the quality of the instruction, the learner's aptitude, the learner's learning strategies, the learner's motivation, and the amount of time allowed (John Carroll), we can see that the medium and the message are a part of a very complex equation. To simplify this to a "which one is best" question is to ignore the complexity of the "authentic" environment.
Who is saying "which one is best?" Clark was saying that you can ignore the medium of instruction because it is not a factor. I am saying that in at least one case (audio vs. text) it is a factor and must be entered into the equation.
I have no idea which one is best. I do know that if I had a choice between audio and text, I would choose text (unless you have some other overriding factor). There are some cases where audio may be preferable. If you are teaching pronunciation of a foreign language, audio is helpful. In many poor countries instruction by radio is much cheaper than instruction by published text. But you must keep in mind the intrinsically inferior vehicular capabilities of audio when you design for such a medium. Everything in this world is a trade-off.
[quoting Burns, 21 Oct 96] So far in this week's discussion involving Steven Tripp's article on the effect of media on the learner no one has mentioned matching the media to the learner's learning style. Would this not also influence the effect that the chosen media has on what and how much the learner absorbs in a given "lesson."
If you randomize your subjects, then a theoretically equal number of people with each learning style will be assigned to each group. This could result in no significant difference if some kind of disordinal interaction is taking place. Let's say people of learning style A learn better from audio and people of learning style T learn better from text. The A people assigned to audio will do better and the A people assigned to text will do worse. The T people will do the opposite and their scores will tend to balance out, thus producing no significant difference. In my case I randomized, but still the text group was superior to the audio group. This indicates that even if such learning styles exist, people in general learn better from text.
You might think that my subjects were imperfectly randomized, which is, of course, entirely possible. But then you would have to explain Furnham and Gunter's repeated results which were essentially the same as mine.
Perhaps I have misunderstood some of the comments that have been broadcasted so far, but I find it hard to believe that the choice of media would not effect how much the learner absorbs and retains for later use. Surely research on TV violence and its effects on young children indicate a negative outcome. (Is this not one reason why Power Rangers was removed from many TV stations in several countries?)
This is not an effect of TV; it is an effect of the content.
This is a totally different subject, entirely unrelated to my experiment, but what the hell...
I believe that TV does have an effect. There have been studies of similar communities, essentially identical except for their ability to receive TV. Such places existed in Canada, I am told. The TV city had a higher rate of crime and violence. When civilization finally reached the non-TV city, its crime and violence rate went up to match city #1 (no citation, no date). TV alone may not have been the cause (content is obviously a factor) but it certainly was the vehicle that delivered the vegetables.
Belief #2: I believe TV made youth culture legitimate. It was a mirror in which youth could see themselves, and thus legitimized their tastes and behaviors. Before TV, only adult culture was legitimate. After TV, we get rock'n'roll (notice that its onset coincides with TV), Elvis, teenage gangs, and many other forms of children's culture.