Students as Multimedia Composers

This study is distinguished by distancing itself from the type of multimedia research that looks at the etTects of multimedia instructional units on students. The approach. instead, is within a constructionist learning paradigm and the research task is to take the first steps to begin to know what we don’t know about the student creation of multimedia documents. The outcome of preliminary research on the use of MediaText. a multimedia composition tool. with high school students across several disciplines indicates from an analysis of document level and link level data on 62 student-produced multimedia documents across individual students and assignments that students unfamiliar with multimedia tend to apply their existing writing skills to produce annotated text rather than integrated compositions. in which the links are clearly part of the structure of the data. RESEARCtI AND -I-tfEORY OF MULTIMEDIA IN EDUCATION The notion of applying multimedia to education has been around for a number of years. There are a large number of educational multimedia products on a variety of topics produced, somctimcs by tcachcrs. but most of the time by professional or academic instructional designers. The educational power of this new medium is indeed extrcmcly thought provoking. Howcvcr, students have often been fixed at the stationary endpoint of these instructional units, the targets of the instructional designers’ objectives. Thus, the student’s position in this multimedia system has changed very little from the old CAI days. This paper discusses the use of multimedia to cmpowcr students with the ability to express their thoughts in an ever expanding range of “media avenues”. Specifically, we look at the documents students created using the software, MediaText. which empowers students with the expressive capabilities of multimedia, and little of the previously associated up front cost of learning a programming language or professional level, multimedia packages lo manipulate the ditferent media. There is a long history of research on the effects of media on learning, much of it dealing with a single medium (for reviews of the literature, see [l-4]). This research has focused on the effectiveness of various media in learning and instruction. Researchers have extended this single medium research to the frontier of multimedia research. They explore what functionalities of multimedia systems are beneficial to learning from instructional units they produce. We have broken from this line of research by using two distinctions that have been recently introduced into the educational research literature. The first distinction we use is made by Papert [5] between instructionism and constructionism. This distinction forms one of the cornerstones of our notion of how multimedia should be used in education. Instructionism is the notion that students are passive receptacles for the knowledge that the teacher or some other instructional medium imparts to them. Paper1 takes two steps away from this notion, first with constructivism, and second with constructionism. where: “The word with the v expresses the theory that knowledge is built by the learner, not supplied by the teacher. The word with the n expresses the further idea that this happens especially felicitously when the learner is engaged in the construction of something external or at least sharable . . . a sand castle. a machine, a computer program, a book.” [5. p. 31