There have been responses to Steve Tripp's paper expressing some astonishment that the question of media influence on learning is still being pursued. However, there is the underlying and (for me, at least) intriguing question of why the issue will simply not go away. Ian Hart, if I understand him correctly, believes that the progressive shift from transmissive to constructivist theories of learning have taken the puff out of the debate in its original form. Again, in previous discussions of this issue, Tom Reeves pointed to questions of ethics and responsibility in continuing to invest energy into research with only marginal potential outcomes for the massive learning problems we confront globally, and that point is also relevant. However, I can very well see that Steve Tripp's results, with whatever the immediate scope of their applicability, suggest possibilities--for example--for accelerating learning, which is certainly, in my opinion, a relevant contemporary issue.
I don't really want to buy into the grand framework of the debate at this point, but to come back to Steve's comments about the difficulty of defining media:
[quoting Tripp, 22 Oct 96.b] 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. ... If anyone has a more satisfying treatment of this problem, I would be pleased to hear it (or preferably, read it).
James Alty, at Loughborough University in the UK, suggested an interesting model for "media," precisely because of the difficulties of definition occasioned by the emergence of multimedia. He modifies an original model of Frolich, and separates out "modes" (language, action), from "creation mechanism," "recognition sense," and "medium" (speech, text, gesture, sound, graphics, motion). I have often referred back to this elegant model because it is intentionally "device-independent" and tries to address the semantic difficulties to which Steve refers. The reference is below:
Alty J.L. (1991). Multimedia: what is it and how do we exploit it? Report No. 91/P/LUTCHI/0110. Lutchi Research Centre, Loughborough University of Technology.