[quoting Farquhar, 21 Oct 96] Steve, you appear to accede the fact that media within a class are instructionally equal (e.g. all forms of "quality" audio). However, I can't seem to clearly identify these general classes of media of which you refer. Is the "text" media class exclusively different from the "visual" class?
John, you have put your finger on a sticky problem. I struggled with this for quite a while. Is a computer a medium? Is a movie a medium? As I said, Clark doesn't define media, so I felt I needed to try in order to test his hypothesis. If it turns out that media cannot be defined then Clark's hypothesis is meaningless.
I am not very happy with arguments about definitions. It seems that in math you can define L to be "the set of all humanly learnable languages" and then construct an argument. However, in social argument like this, you try to define your terms and immediately someone uses the word in a way you didn't intend and you have no way to control that. Also people will say that they don't agree with your definition. Imagine someone saying, "I don't agree that L is the set of all humanly learnable languages." It doesn't make sense. But it does make sense to say that you don't agree that media means X. Thus our definitions are not like mathematical definitions. I think that is because we are using words that are part of a language. The definition of media is not to be invented--it is to be discovered. The meaning of media depends upon how ordinary people usually use the word. I tried to introspect and see how I usually use the word. I guess I felt that CD-ROM, and floppies, and video tape are all media, but I also felt that the delivery channel is also a medium. Thus I can write a sentence on my Mac (a computer) and play it back as audio using SimpleText. I felt that the actual underlying technology was unimportant, since I could have tape recorded the sound and played it back with a tape recorder. If you access my web server you will see some places where I can deliver recorded sound (and live video). Does the underlying technology matter from the learner's point of view (other things being equal)? I concluded that it did not. Thus audio delivered by computer, tape player, radio, phonograph, or even live over an intercom are all kinds of audio. My guess is that ordinary people would call each of those means a medium and they would also call audio a medium.
I also struggled with which word to use to describe the written presentation. Sometimes I used text, but I also wanted to use the word "printed" to describe it. Plainly reading involves a "visual" medium, but it is not visual in the ordinary sense of audio-visual education. Visual there means some kind of "pictures." Language is primarily a digital medium (oops, there's that medium word again) which can be encoded as sound waves (analog) or as print (digital symbols). Print being digital, is not in the same class with analog pictures. Thus, I refer to the text treatment as text, not as visual, in order to avoid association with analog visuals. Obviously, printed text is a visual medium of a sort, but as long as the visual medium is being used to transmit digital symbols, we tend not to think of it as a visual medium.
Anyway, for lack of counter evidence, I elected to treat any audio medium as audio and any text medium as text, provided, of course, that quality is above a certain threshold.
If anyone has a more satisfying treatment of this problem, I would be pleased to hear it (or preferably, read it).