Fig. 1 A mashup between Freevector and a Wordle
I like a Wordle for the fun of them. Feels lazy to put words into a digital box and give it a shake. Anyone can have a go. This one is edited notes on the Tindall-Ford paper and a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry on Maria Montessori.
Same info, a different shake of the Wordle digital box.
Fig.2. Montessori and Tindall-Ford put through the Wordle tombola of word cloud generation.
The Good
Fig.1. Maria Montessori
My journey into accessibility guidelines, legislation, principles and case studies quickly diverted me into the nature of multi-modal learning. I knew as I started this module that I was looking for or expected when I term the 'Montesori Effect'.
Maria Montesori was ill-treated because of her gender, finding resistance to her desire to study medicine and further resistance once she got there. I wonder if there is resonance here for a disabled student meeting resistance or faced with prejudice of any kind when pursing their academic studies? Montessori's early studies involved children with disabilities and it is through this that she developed her educational philosophy that has come to influence the ways we teach. I can see that her work is something I shall have to study too.
'Montessori experimented with allowing children free choice of the materials, uninterrupted work, and freedom of movement and activity within the limits set by the environment'. Wikipedia (last accessed 31st October 2012)
Turning to reading up on accessibility guidelines I read through the following:
National Center for Accessible Media
Software and tools
Educational Issues for Students with Disabilities
Accessible interactive software can bring the benefits of multimedia and experimental learning to students who may otherwise be left out. Interactive learning experiences will be especially enriching for students who may otherwise have more limited experiences. Because students with disabilities may not be exposed to as wide a range of activities as other students, accessible software can contribute positively toward filling in some of those gaps.
Low-vision students may still learn from a visual program, provided it is well designed.
Software should allow:
These benefits are especially important for students learning English as a second language and those with reading difficulty. Accessible textbooks and software often provide multi-modal access to information, combining text with audio.
Tindall-Ford and colleagues showed in several different experiments that when information is presented in audio and visual form, performance on complex tasks is improved (1997).
'The intellectual complexity of information, generated by the degree of element interactivity, may determine the conditions under which the structure of presented information is critical and thus, when cognitively derived information-presentation techniques such as integrated and audio-visual packages are most useful. Finally, the measures of perceived mental effort used in this article lend further support to the notion that cognitive load is a critical and major factor when formatting information'. (Tindall-Ford et al 1997:283- 84)
The Bad?
Fig.2. A contemporary example of dual-mode learning?
'When two sensory modes are better than one' deserves a class of its own. I've migrated discussion on this to an e-learning group in Linkedin while opening it up to discussion here and in the H810 Student Forum.
J.R. Williams reviewed about 100 studies from the literature on use of multimedia in instruction and found that combining visual and verbal information can lead to enhanced comprehension (1998). Mentioned in the above guidelines, though not giving the reference I offer below - again, worth studying in its own right.
The Ugly?
Fig.3. An example of the integrated instructions used by Tindall et al (1997)
FURTHER LINKS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Montessori
REFERENCE
Tindall-Ford, S, Chandler, P, & Sweller, J 1997, 'When two sensory modes are better than one', Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 3, 4, pp. 257-287, (Last viewed 31st October 2012).
Williams J.R. (1998) Guidelines for the Use of Multimedia in Instruction Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting October 1998 42: 1447-1451,
Fig.1. Audio without books - no better than the books on their own. Research shows that what works is when the two work together.
Too many companies are currently touting software that can take a 45 minute lecture and package it in a form that makes in bitesized and tagged - butting it through the MagiMix, diced. I can't say it will necessarily improve or add to the learning experience, though I do like to stop start, rewind, play over, repeat, take notes ... go back to the start.
The definitive research on use of audio and text to enhance effective learning was done in the 1990s and published in various papers starting with 'When two sensory modes are better than one' (1997).
Worth the read and written with the multimedia world that was then emerging in mind.
It takes skill and thought to get it right - we've all heard of 'Death by Power Point' - we used to try to avoid 'Death by talking head' - this doesn't add much, what you want is the voice over explaining actions as they take place with text superimposed where the action takes place - even captions and subtitled can cause a cognitive split, increase mental overload and diminish the effectiveness of the learning experience.
REFERENCE
Tindall-Ford, S, Chandler, P, & Sweller, J 1997, 'When two sensory modes are better than one', Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 3, 4, pp. 257-287
This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.
