[quoting Sims, 17 Mar 95] ..it is important to recognize that multimedia as a medium is NOT better than the traditional medium--how we use it is what is critical. And the control issue is one which has received perhaps more research and debate than anything else over the past 20 years of CAL/interactive multimedia.
Those with gray hairs and yellow teeth will always remember the continued claims that new technology will solve all educational problems. I say BEWARE. And anyway, once we are all ensnared by the web, it all be a different ball game.
[quoting Wild, 18 Mar 95] I don't yet (or ever expect to) have yellow teeth (which dentist do you visit, Rod?) yet am conscious of what is being referred to in the above message. Are we really about to drag up the hoary old myths about the effects of particular media on learning--and worst still, begin to debate them all over again? Shouldn't we address issues of more currency--the sort of things both Tom Reeves and Ron Oliver have invited us to consider in their recent papers?
I agree with Rod about the importance of the "how" and with Martyn about revisiting old debates. I believe the issue of the actual or assumed effects of technological mediation on learning will keep arising in more or less the same form if our implicit frame of reference supposes a constant meaning for "learning." Clark and Salomon were quite right to challenge researchers to stop fruitlessly investigating the issue unless they could come up with new conceptual frameworks. I confess I haven't revisited their papers for the fine detail lately, but I think they were right because the "learning" they had in their sights at the time had more to do with the mastery of prevailing canons of knowledge than with the idea of a dialectical cycle of reflection and active experience (yes, experience with technology as well) pointing to creating the future rather than acquiring the past.
Tom's essay [ITForum #5] is particularly relevant because time is running out. By the time educational technology research gets round to extending its conceptual frameworks in a substantive way to postmodernism, post-structuralism, critical theory, phenomenology, action research, qualitative and naturalistic methods, etc., it will already be left behind by other fields (have a look at organizational theory, to take one example) which will have built on some of these frameworks to extend and enrich understanding of their domains and launched off elsewhere.